Director, Not Performer
What is it to build software with coding agents? It's something distinctly different than writing code by hand.
Thought Eddies
I've Stopped Learning Programming Languages
In 2022, I had recently started a new job as a software engineer. As usual, there were a lot of new things to learn and one of those was getting comfortable working in a programming language that I hadn't used professionally before.
Reviving a Raspberry Pi with Claude Code
Sometime in 2021 (I think), I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and played with it a little and then it started collecting dust on my desk. Every time I looked at it, I saw lots of fun possibilities and lots of unfun software updates that I would need to work through before those fun things would be possible.
Why Write
I enjoy writing. Most of my writing here is about software and technology, but lately I've been struggling.
Year in Review: 2025
This year was another year of wild change in technology and software engineering. It felt like the year flew by yet so much happened during it.
Images as Context
Working with coding agents has been a dance of context management. These days, if an agent loop isn't producing the result I want, it's more often than not a problem of context rather than a shortcoming of the language model or agent scaffold/harness.
On Writing, Speaking and Thinking
Have you ever observed someone try and demonstrate how they use a coding agent? The presenter will usually introduce the concept of an agent, discuss the idea of a software harness wrapping a language model, and then will show an example of how it works.
Embeddings with sqlite-vector
About a year and a half ago I wrote about using sqlite-vss to store and query embedding vectors in a SQLite database. Much has changed since then and I'm working on a project that motivated another pass at querying embeddings on a local system for smallish datasets. The sqlite-vector project seemed...
Debugging DSPy token usage and prompts
As I've experimented more with DSPy, I've attempted to dig further into the details of the specific LLM I am using to better understand things like token usage, reasoning, and the specific prompts being sent to the model. While, DSPy's abstraction is one of the more lightweight for LLM frameworks,...
Intro to DSPy
The viral "how many r's are there in the word 'strawberry'?" problem is a great motivating example to experiment with the capabilities of DSPy, an increasingly popular, powerful library for running inference with language models. While the counting letters problem itself is a poor application of a...