Linux Setup Was a Hazing Ritual. Agents Changed It.
Why developers picked macOS over Linux was never the OS. It was the setup. Six breakages on my own machines, and what an agent changed about fixing them.
Notes on production AI, security leadership, and the craft of software.
Long-form essays for founders, engineering leaders, and senior ICs building at AI-native startups. Real numbers from real engagements, opinionated on what actually works. Browse all 21 topics → Earlier writing from the original Sublime Coding blog lives in the archive.
Topic guides
Curated reading orders by subject — start here if you want the argument for a topic compressed into 5–6 essays rather than browsed across the full index.
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AI engineering
What production AI engineering actually looks like in 2026 — the autonomy ladder for agents, the workflow shift, telemetry, and team sizing.
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Security for startups
A guided reading order for startup security — what to read first on SOC 2 as a revenue tool, vCISO hiring, and securing AI-native products.
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Engineering leadership
Engineering leadership at startup scale — hiring from one engineer to fifteen, rituals that work at small teams, the staff-engineer interview loop.
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Elixir and the BEAM for AI systems
Why language choice matters for AI systems — BEAM concurrency for agents, what Go frameworks cost you, and why Elixir is the language AI writes best.
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Omarchy
Running Omarchy with coding agents, starting on an M1 MacBook: the install, what breaks, the keyboard, and what a security lead inherits from agents.
Narrow Front Door, Visible Back Rooms
Going fractional? Get in the door with one narrow problem, then make the rest of your work easy to find, because the engineers who find you pull you into more.
Adding a Newsletter to a Phoenix Site With No Database
This site has no Ecto, no Repo, no database at all. Here's how the newsletter signup works when the system of record is a third-party API, not a table.
Your Personal Brand Is an Attack Surface
Every talk, bio, and commit you publish to build a name is also recon and impersonation fuel. A vCISO's founder-scale checklist for hardening your identity.
I Built the Distribution Tools My Blog Needed
Ten skills my coding agent runs to fact-check drafts and find where my posts stop reaching people, tested on my own site before I sold them.
Elixir Libraries Discord and Supabase Open-Sourced
Discord and Supabase publish Elixir libraries. What each solves, whether it is still maintained in 2026, and whether a small team should depend on it.
Would I Trust Agents to QA My Daily Driver?
Omarchy's new Agentic QA swarm tests every release. I run Omarchy on two machines and update within days. Here's what the design catches, and what it can't.
Who Actually Runs Elixir in Production, Fact-Checked
A viral infographic ranked 15 companies using Elixir by valuation. Fact-checked: nine rows hold up, three are stale or unsupported, four name the wrong system.
DHH's Rails World 2026 Keynote: Pencils Down, Now What
DHH told Rails World 2026 that hand-writing code no longer pays. What he gets right, what Basecamp 5 proves, and who owns the code nobody reads.
Omarchy on a Company Laptop: The SOC 2 Verdict
An engineer wants to run Omarchy on a company laptop. Here's the verdict a security lead signs off on, control by control, for a SOC 2 Type II shop.
I Graded My Blog Against a 2014 Marketing Course
I graded my own site against a 2014 developer-marketing course. It was right about the two things I skipped, dated on platforms, and silent on AI answers.
Omarchy Shortcuts on a Mac Keyboard: What Changes
Omarchy has 200+ keybindings and most work unchanged on a MacBook. Here's the ~15 that don't — screenshots, brightness, Fn, lid, trackpad — and why.
Omarchy Runs Your Coding Agent With the Safety Off
Omarchy's launcher gives every coding agent a skip-approval flag by default. The attack surface a security lead inherits, and what Omarchy gets right.
How to Actually Make Money With AI in 2026: An Engineer Ranks 13 Side Hustles
An engineer who builds AI systems ranks 13 ways to make money with AI in 2026 by ceiling, moat, time to first dollar, and fulfillment burden.
Cisco's Network Config Engine Is Secretly Erlang
Cisco NSO and ConfD run their core on Erlang. Why the network-automation world never noticed, and where the BEAM actually fits this domain.
Model Routers Are Vendors. Review Them Like One.
PRC labs harvested their own users' sessions, many arriving via third-party model routers. The fix isn't about Claude — it's treating the router as a vendor.
Multi-Agent AI Teams Agree Their Way Into Garbage
I set two agent frameworks loose on real work in team-of-agents mode. They agreed their way into the wrong product. The research says exactly why.
I Read Omarchy's AGENTS.md So You Don't Have To
Omarchy's own AGENTS.md, skills, and a design doc reviewed by two other vendors' agents — read from the quattro branch, not the README.
Anthropic's Extreme Scenario Has a Precondition
Anthropic published an economic upside scenario and an alignment risk admission the same week. The upside needs the thing nobody has a plan for.
Validating LLM Tool Call Arguments With Ecto
Ecto schemaless changesets as the pre-execution trust boundary on LLM tool-call arguments, not another output-shape validator.
All writing
- September 8, 2026 Agents Don't Need Prompts. They Need Managers.
- September 7, 2026 I Put Omarchy on an M1 MacBook Pro
- September 3, 2026 I Read Oban's Source Code So You Don't Have To
- September 1, 2026 Building an LLM Audit Trail That Passes SOC 2
- August 31, 2026 Throttling LLM Calls in Elixir Before You Hit 429
- August 27, 2026 Agents Are Already Writing a Language You Can't Read
- August 25, 2026 The Agent Evidence Pack for a Security Review
- August 20, 2026 Wiring LiveView Uploads to Claude Vision
- August 18, 2026 Most Security Controls Assume a Team You Don't Have
- August 17, 2026 Structured LLM Output in Elixir: Which Library, When
- August 15, 2026 What Elixir Gives a Coding Harness for Free
- August 13, 2026 Metering LLM Usage Per Customer in Phoenix
- August 12, 2026 Your Junior Dev Leans on the Agent. Good.
- August 11, 2026 The Hard Part Was Never the Code. It Was the Theory.
- August 10, 2026 Phoenix Secrets: runtime.exs, Fly.io, and LLM Keys
- August 9, 2026 The Office Mandate Is a Measurement Failure
- August 8, 2026 Every Insane Codebase Was Once Rational
- August 7, 2026 Nobody Got Replaced. Agents Got Added.
- August 7, 2026 What I Check When I Inherit a Vibe-Coded App
- August 6, 2026 Multi-Tenant AI SaaS in Phoenix: Isolation That Holds
- August 5, 2026 Schlep Blindness Is the Only Moat Agents Can’t Cross
- August 4, 2026 What Four Months of Embedded AI Engineering Ships
- August 3, 2026 Estimating Client Work When Agents Do the Building
- August 2, 2026 The Career I Built on Work Nobody Wanted
- August 1, 2026 Your Coding Agent Has No Reason to Write Good Code
- July 31, 2026 AIOS v2: The Scope Is the Filesystem
- July 30, 2026 Jose Valim Is Right: Anthropic's Incentive Problem
- July 30, 2026 Instrumenting LLM Calls in Phoenix with Telemetry
- July 29, 2026 Detection Got Cheap. Remediation Didn't.
- July 29, 2026 The One File Where Your AI Model Names Live
- July 28, 2026 What a 96% Security Benchmark Actually Measures
- July 28, 2026 10 Ecto Query Patterns for N+1 and Beyond
- July 27, 2026 Isolating Parallel Claude Code Agents in Phoenix
- July 26, 2026 What Reverse Acqui-Hires Actually Diligence
- July 25, 2026 The Four Claude Code Hooks I Run on Every Project
- July 24, 2026 Performance Reviews When Agents Do the Typing
- July 23, 2026 What Together AI's $800M Round Says About Elixir
- July 23, 2026 Why We'd Pick Elixir for an AI Startup Backend
- July 22, 2026 Shadow AI at a Startup That Can't Buy a CASB
- July 21, 2026 12 Phoenix LiveView Patterns for Production
- July 20, 2026 Testing AI Agent Outputs in Elixir with ExUnit
- July 19, 2026 The Onboarding Playbook for an Agent-Heavy Codebase
- July 18, 2026 TDD With Claude Code in Elixir: What Holds Up
- July 17, 2026 Security Engineer or vCISO? Your First Hire, by Stage
- July 16, 2026 What I Put in CLAUDE.md After 50 Commits With It
- July 15, 2026 Secrets Management for AI Agents on Small Teams
- July 14, 2026 Streaming LLM Tokens in LiveView, the 2026 Way
- July 13, 2026 Trust Is the Operating System
- July 12, 2026 The 17x Discount Hiding in Your AI Coding Bill
- July 11, 2026 A Scared Team Is Your Biggest Attack Surface
- July 10, 2026 What Cyber Insurance Underwriters Ask AI Startups
- July 9, 2026 Build an MCP Server in Phoenix With Hermes
- July 9, 2026 AIOS: An AI Operating System in Plain Markdown
- July 8, 2026 What an AI Agent Postmortem Should Contain
- July 7, 2026 Why Auto-Filled Security Questionnaires Kill AI Deals
- July 6, 2026 Building an AI Memory That Outlives Any Single Agent
- July 6, 2026 The Claude Code Plugin Stack I Actually Run
- July 6, 2026 4,154 Commits in Six Months With AI Agents
- July 4, 2026 Programming Sucks, Now With Agents
- July 3, 2026 Prompt Injection Defense for a 5-Person AI Startup
- July 2, 2026 Oban as a Durable AI Agent Runtime in Elixir
- June 30, 2026 Surviving Technical Due Diligence as an AI Founder
- June 30, 2026 Amazon Let the AI Drive. It Hit a Tree.
- June 29, 2026 Build an LLM Wiki Your Coding Agent Actually Reads
- June 29, 2026 Your CLAUDE.md Is the Onboarding Doc You Never Wrote
- June 26, 2026 AI Made Tokens Cheap. It's Making Hardware Costly.
- June 26, 2026 The Perfect Hire Is Killing Your Team
- June 25, 2026 The AI Coding Agent Bugs I Catch Every Week
- June 23, 2026 15 Elixir Libraries I Reach For in 2026
- June 21, 2026 Build an AI Agent Loop in 50 Lines of Elixir
- June 18, 2026 RAG in Phoenix: Hand-Rolled pgvector or Arcana?
- June 17, 2026 We're About to Stop Making Senior Engineers
- June 15, 2026 Nadella Is Right About AI and the Firm. Mostly.
- June 7, 2026 A Professional Owns the Whole Outcome
- June 3, 2026 Prove the Return or Don't Spend the Time
- May 31, 2026 Elixir's BEAM Is the Runtime AI Agents Want
- May 27, 2026 Elixir Is the Language AI Codes Best
- May 26, 2026 Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
- May 16, 2026 Elixir's Concurrency Model Is the One You Actually Want
- May 16, 2026 Why Every AI Agent Framework Is Written in Go (And What That Costs You)
- May 16, 2026 Ruby Isn't Dead, It Got Boring — And Boring Is Why It Ships
- May 9, 2026 How I Prompt Claude as a Staff Engineer (50 Prompts I Actually Use)
- May 7, 2026 Ruflo (formerly Claude Flow): An Honest Deep Dive on the Multi-Agent Orchestration Platform
- May 7, 2026 The Claude Code Resource Bible: 46 Tools Worth Knowing in 2026
- May 3, 2026 What 90 Days of a Fractional Security Engagement Actually Looks Like
- May 2, 2026 An AI Just Deleted a Production Database in Nine Seconds. Hire More Engineers.
- May 1, 2026 AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One
- April 27, 2026 SOC 2 Is a Revenue Tool, Not a Security Tool
- April 20, 2026 How I'd Run Security at an AI-Native Company in 2026
- April 13, 2026 How We Cut $350K From Cloud Spend in 6 Months (And What I'd Do Differently)
- April 6, 2026 vCISO Math for AI Founders: Why 5 Hours a Month Beats a Full-Time Hire
- March 30, 2026 Migrating 225K Users from AWS Cognito to Auth0 Without Forcing a Single Logout
- March 16, 2026 AI-Assisted Engineering Isn't Faster Coding. It's a New Workflow.
- February 23, 2026 How I'd Hire a Staff Engineer at an AI Startup
- February 9, 2026 The Ruby to Elixir Migration That Cut Our Service Footprint From Ten to Six
- January 26, 2026 Your AI Product Needs a Telemetry Layer Before It Needs a Better Model
- January 12, 2026 From One Engineer to Fifteen: What Co-Founding Taught Me About Engineering Leadership
- December 29, 2025 The Pre-Series-A AI Startup Hiring Plan: Who to Hire, in What Order, and Why Most Get It Wrong
- December 22, 2025 When to Trust an Agent and When to Step In
- December 8, 2025 How I Triage a New Codebase in 90 Minutes
- November 24, 2025 My Daily Agentic AI Workflow
- November 10, 2025 The 'Smallest Possible Slice' Heuristic for Shipping Complex Features
- October 27, 2025 How to Manage a 4-Person Engineering Team Without Becoming a Manager