15 posts
There are thirty-three repositories in my workspace, and I cannot hold more than two of them in my head at once. They sit side by side in one folder, but it is not a monorepo. Each is its own indepen...
Tesseract could not read a word of it. I have years of handwritten journals, the actual paper kind, and I wanted them on this site. The obvious first move is optical character recognition, and the ob...
There is a 4.8 megabyte TypeScript file in my repository that I did not write. A script writes it, on every build, and I commit the result into git like it was mine. Most build advice would tell me th...
The em dash is the easy one. I can catch every em dash I will ever type with about nine lines of shell, and I do, on every commit. The script walks my published posts and the book chapters and fails ...
A strict Content-Security-Policy on a static site allowlists inline scripts by hash. Change one script, forget to update the hash, and every page renders blank. The incident that taught me, and the deploy guard that ends it.
I write constantly about giving complex things a map and a vocabulary. My own blog did not have one. So I directed an agent to read the site as a graph, and the first thing the map did was catch me. A build log, a deliverable, and what I hope to learn as I improve it.
Agent mode and autonomous mode get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The difference is who closes the loop: you, after every task, or the system, on a schedule. A working engineer's disambiguation.
Not a tools list. The tools changed three times this year; what changed underneath is where the hours go: specs in the morning, batch review in the afternoon, and the judgment work that never left.
The code got cheap. The review did not. Here is the review workflow I actually use when AI agents write most of the diff: three passes, an adversarial second agent, and the discipline of reading what ships.
AI took the typing, and the cost of software engineering did not go away. It moved from the hands to the head and got heavier. The new scarce resource is your attention, and the new discipline is managing it.
Agent mode is not a faster way to type. It moves the unit of thought up from syntax to intent, turns you into a conductor of parallel work, and makes the real bottleneck the clarity you can hold in your head at once.
I used GitHub Copilot in VS Code for a long time, always with Claude underneath. Then I moved most of my work to Claude Code. Here is the honest comparison for DevOps and infrastructure work, from someone who ships with both.
Agent mode is when you stop typing code and start directing an AI that reads your codebase, writes the change, runs the tests, and reports back. Here is what it actually is, how the loop works, and when to reach for it, from someone who ships production systems this way.
Not prompts. Real file access, real execution, real consequences. The patterns that hold in agent mode and the failure modes nobody warns you about.
AI hasn't replaced software engineers. It has moved the bottleneck. The cost of writing code dropped to near zero; the cost of deciding what to build, how to architect it, and when to ship became the whole job. A field report from a year of running production work in agent mode.