What my grandfather understood about being indispensable
Let me tell you about the most productive week of my career, during which I accomplished absolutely nothing of value and was lavishly praised for it.
I was brand new to the company, early career. First week on the team, still learning where the coffee was, still doing that thing where you laugh a beat late at jokes you did...
JWT vs Session Tokens: The One Sentence That Actually Matters
If you've built more than one web app, you've had this argument with a teammate: "just use JWTs" vs "sessions are simpler and safer." Both people are usually right just about different situations, and most explanations never make clear which situation is which.
Here's the one-sentence version that cu...
Notes from January 2026, when giving an AI agent live database access still felt reckless. Written for engineers who are about to do this, and for the leads deciding whether they should.
I had just finished connecting a coding agent to two things at once: the filesystem of a legacy PHP application, and the MySQL database behin...
Every AI provider publishes a price in dollars per million tokens. Every comparison table ranks by it. Every build-versus-buy spreadsheet runs on it.
That number is misleading, and not in a small way. It can be wrong by 10x, and wrong in the direction that makes the expensive option look cheap.
This piece explains seven things about the real cost of AI work. Eac...
Every AI agent session starts as a fresh mind. It has no memory of yesterday, no memory of the correction you gave it last week, and no idea what your company has already decided.
That is fine for one developer with one project. It falls apart the moment you have five teams, because now the things that must be true everywhere have to somehow be true in every session, of every project, f...
If you are still hardcoding tool definitions, JSON schemas, and manual routing logic directly into your AI agent initialization scripts, you are building on quicksand.
For years, early iterations of agentic frameworks forced developers to hardcode capabilities right into the core application loop. This static paradigm mirrors the early days of web development, where every HTML page, sc...