AI Patterns

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Observability for AI-Assisted Development

Developers using AI estimate they’re 24% faster. A randomised controlled trial measured them at 19% slower.That’s from METR’s 2025 study. These were experienced open-source developers working on their own codebases with tools they chose. Their self-assessment was off by over 40 percentage points.If your perception of AI’s impact is that unreliable, what are you actually measuring?If you didn’t measure before AI, measuring with AI won’t work.You can’t attribute improvements to AI if you don’t know what “before” looked like. Cycle...

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The Judgement Pyramid: Reasoning vs Measurement

A team I was talking to had built a code-review skill in Claude Code. It looked good: a careful prompt, a set of rules, and examples. Then it shipped a PR with a nested recursive loop inside another recursive loop. Cyclomatic complexity any static analyser (PMD, radon, ESLint’s complexity rule) would have flagged in milliseconds. The skill missed it.The team’s response was to iterate the skill. More examples. More rules. A few more lines of prompt. The context window kept...

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The Unix Philosophy for Agentic Coding

Most people use AI coding agents backwards. They hand the agent a problem and ask it to solve the whole thing. The agent reads, reasons, generates, and hopes for the best.There’s a better way. One that’s cheaper, more predictable, and already well understood. It’s the Unix philosophy, applied to how we work with AI.The Unix philosophy boils down to: do one thing well, compose small tools, let the shell orchestrate. When you work with an AI coding agent, the agent...

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Context Engineering for AI-Assisted Development

Same model, different tools, different results.If you’ve used Claude Sonnet in Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf, you’ve noticed this. The model is identical, but the behavior varies. This isn’t magic. It’s context engineering.In Principles for Building With AI, I mentioned that “context is everything” and that “context engineering matters more than prompt engineering.” But I didn’t explain what that means or how to do it. This post fills that gap.Imagine you’re in a day-long strategy meeting. There’s one whiteboard...

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The Comfort Plateau AI Built For You

I’ve spent the last year watching engineers and writers adopt these tools, and the same pattern keeps showing up. The first three months look transformative. The next nine look almost identical to the first three.The output keeps coming. The confidence keeps building. The skill stops moving.This isn’t a story about AI making people dumber. It’s a story about a comfort plateau that didn’t exist before, and what it costs to stay on it.Draw a spider chart. Hundreds of axes: SQL,...

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