Programming Articles
We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now
A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]
The Workflow That Teaches Itself: A Self-Improving Agent Workflow
There’s a wave of writing right now about “harness engineering” — the idea that the infrastructure wrapped around an AI agent matters more than the model underneath it. The data is hard to argue with. Vercel deleted 80% of their agent’s tools and watched accuracy jump from 80% to 100%. OpenAI published a dedicated post […]
AI Agent Collaboration Starts with the Right Mental Model
You’re probably treating your AI agent like a junior developer. I know I was. It makes sense, right? The framing shows up in genuinely respected places — OpenAI’s own prompt engineering documentation advises treating GPT models like “a junior coworker” who needs explicit instructions to produce good output; engineering teams at major consultancies have characterized […]
The Most Important Software Development “Tool” in the Age of AI
The software industry is rapidly evolving right before our eyes. It’s both exciting and somewhat terrifying to witness. Paradigm shifts are often uncomfortable, but we know that AI tooling is here to stay, so we need to make the most of it — in a responsible manner. It’s very easy to tell a coding agent […]
A Manager’s Guide to AI Adoption in Software Engineering Teams: Just Keep Prompting
AI tools for coding aren’t a nice-to-have anymore — they’re table stakes. At SEP, we recognized that early and gave engineering teams the green light to start using them, provided the tools met our security standards and our clients’. Once the green light was given, engineers across the organization were free to use AI in their work. The only stipulation: each […]
Planning-First AI Methodology: The Foundation of Successful AI Collaboration
Why starting with understanding, not code, is the key to unlocking AI’s full potential in software development Picture this: You’re 7 hours into your work day, you’re on your third cup of coffee, and the AI just generated 200 lines of code that compile perfectly… and do absolutely nothing you wanted. Sound familiar? If you’ve […]
So Long, “beforeEach”? New Testing Pattern in JavaScript
Tests in TypeScript or JavaScript often run setup code inside hooks like “beforeEach”: Developers must take care to get the setup correct, especially in large or nested test suites. Some test runners now provide fixtures-per-test. We can re-write our test suite as the following: This test setup addresses our original pain points, and adds a […]
The AI Coding Revolution: Why Your Development Team Needs to Invest Now or Risk Being Left Behind
A developer’s perspective on mastering AI coding tools for competitive advantage The software development landscape has undergone more transformation in the past year than in the previous decade combined. As AI coding tools evolve from novelty to necessity, development teams face a critical decision: invest heavily in learning these tools now, or watch competitors pull […]
Learning AI Optimization w/ Factorio 2: Modelling
What is this project? If you have not yet read the introduction, you can find it here. The abridged version is is: My goal is to create a system for determining the “best” possible Factorio factories based on footprint and cost to build. Modelling? So, one of the key things for making a maze solver, […]
Learning AI Optimization w/ Factorio 1/x
Who am I? My name is Keith Hanson, I graduated from Rose-Hulman with a degree in Software Engineering in 2021. In my time since graduation I worked extensively with infrastructure as code and on backend systems. Notably what you won’t find in my project background is anything to do with AI. I took 1 course […]
Vibe Coding Is the Purest Form of Agile (And That’s the Problem)
Vibe coding absolutely nails the values of Agile, and quietly violates the mechanisms that make Agile work. Vibe coding might be the purest form of Agile we’ve ever seen. No standups, no tickets, no backlog grooming, just chaos and bliss. It nails the Agile values: working software, responding to change, and individuals over process. The […]
Why Vibe Coding Fails – and How Signal Coding Fixes It
AI is an amplifier for whatever signal we humans provide. Garbage in, garbage out. Signal in, software out. – Robert Herbig, in the thing you’re currently reading If you haven’t heard of vibe coding, it’s an interesting concept: you prompt an AI agent to do all the coding and focus on fast iterations. Minimize time from thought to working application. […]