The 17x Discount Hiding in Your AI Coding Bill
My team's $200 AI coding seats consume $1,800–$3,500 of API-priced tokens a month. The 10–17x arbitrage nobody prices in, and how to budget for it.
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Posts tagged productivity
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Posts tagged productivity
AIOS: An AI Operating System in Plain Markdown
I open-sourced the AI operating system I run daily: a git-versioned markdown vault, cross-repo wiring, and a nightly ingest loop. Fifteen minutes to set up.
The Claude Code Plugin Stack I Actually Run
The Claude Code plugins that earn a permanent slot in my stack, sorted by what they actually change: my process, my domain expertise, or just friction.
4,154 Commits in Six Months With AI Agents
I shipped more code in 2026 than the previous four years combined. The commits are real. The productivity is real. What I lost is harder to measure.
Programming Sucks, Now With Agents
An homage to Peter Welch's Programming Sucks, updated for agents: a genius intern with amnesia, hallucinated packages, and a closet that eats your auth layer.
Build an LLM Wiki Your Coding Agent Actually Reads
A markdown knowledge base your AI agent reads and maintains: the three-layer architecture, the ingest/query/lint loop, and the rules that stop it rotting.
Prove the Return or Don't Spend the Time
Time is the only budget you can't refill, so every dollar and hour has to show a demonstrable return. The most common way businesses break that rule is buying software nobody asked for.
Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
Most engineers prompt Claude one sentence at a time. Anthropic's own engineers prompt skills. Four rules from their recent talks, with the operator nuance the talks left out.
AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One
Every company rolling out AI is about to discover how much work they were leaving on the table. AI surfaces the backlog you never had bandwidth to touch. The math behind why velocity creates surface area, the failure mode that follows, and why the companies cutting headcount now are about to get outpaced.
AI-Assisted Engineering Isn't Faster Coding. It's a New Workflow.
Most engineers using Claude Code see a 10–15% speedup. The teams seeing 40–55% sequence work differently. The four modes I use AI in, what to never delegate, and how to get a skeptical team across the line.
When to Trust an Agent and When to Step In
The hardest part of agentic AI in 2026 isn't getting the agent to do the work. It's knowing when to override it. The four-level autonomy ladder, the five signals an agent is going off the rails, and a real example of catching one before it shipped a quietly broken auth flow.
How I Triage a New Codebase in 90 Minutes
A fractional engineering engagement starts with a codebase you've never seen. You have ninety minutes to form a useful POV before the kickoff call. The seven-step triage I run, the two questions I bring back to the founder, and how AI tooling has accelerated the process.