Code Quality

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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Level Up Code Quality with an AI Assistant

I've previously discussed how a world class developer experience is essential for a high-performing team. When teams lack such a setup, the most common response is a lack of time or buy-in from stakeholders to build these things. With AI coding assistants being readily available to most developers today, the engineering effort and the cost investment for the business are lessened, reducing the barrier to entry.This blog showcases an actual codebase that has not been actively maintained for over five...

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Psychology of learned helplessness to tackle issues in engineering teams

It is common for teams to struggle with tech debt. It is a raging topic at many tech conferences. Every time it is discussed, folks responsible for the success of their teams listen with rapt attention. They take back the learned ideas to their teams, attempt with renewed vigor, fail, and then go to other avenues, looking for the elusive elixir. The cycle is almost self-perpetuating. Very few teams manage to transform a spaghetti code into a modular and well-composed...

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