Posted on in Programming
CI output is part of your developer experience.
That sounds obvious until you look at the average failed build. A pull request goes red, the developer opens the CI job, and the first thing they see is a scrollback landfill: dependency installation noise, folded shell wrappers, progress bars, warnings from …
Posted on in Programming
AI coding agents are very good at refactors until they are not.
That is the uncomfortable part. The same agent that can rename a helper across a repository, split a giant function, update tests, and clean up repetitive call sites can also make one tiny semantic change that hides inside …
Posted on in Programming
Local CI commands should be boring.
That sounds like faint praise, but boring is exactly what you want from the command that tells a human developer, a coding agent, or a pull request bot whether the repository is healthy enough to trust.
The problem is that many repositories make this …
Posted on in Programming
AI-written tests are dangerous in exactly the way good-looking tests are always dangerous: they can make you feel safer without actually reducing much risk.
That is not an argument against using AI coding agents to write tests. I use them for test scaffolding, edge-case enumeration, fixture cleanup, and regression coverage …
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
AI-generated pull requests are not a new category of code. They are pull requests.
That sounds obvious, but it is the first thing teams forget when the novelty arrives. A pull request created with an AI coding agent still changes production systems, test behavior, user workflows, security posture, operational load …
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
AI coding agents are useful in the same way junior engineers, build scripts, and sharp shell aliases are useful: they can remove friction, accelerate boring work, and occasionally surprise you with a clever path through a problem. They are not a replacement for engineering judgment.
That distinction matters.
The strongest …
