Sharing Theories with Agents
Get in sync with your agents on what you’re really building. Fabulous tool included
ai
Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des Cartes and Francis Bacon were the hotness. People …
Verum Factum and the Creator’s Confidence
Verum Factum: we only really know what we made.
Dang, I know that feeling with software! And I miss it, now that AI is doing the coding.
But sometimes I still get it…
Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.
When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.
Working with AI: Do Things Right
Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles. I give it a simple instruction, it screws it up, I tell it to write a program to do things right.
What is special about MCP?
three things MCP can do, and an infinite number of things it can’t do (all of which make it great) AI agents can interact with the world using tools. Those tools can be generic or specific. Generic Run a bash command Operate a web browser Execute a SQL query Specific See my Google Calendar events …
Augmented Coding: Better with Principles
Today I opened the AWS console in order to transcribe a video, and I could not be bothered to do all that clicking. This has to be six lines in the terminal. I don’t know the six lines, but Claude does. Claude “automated the entire Amazon Transcribe workflow” in 300 lines of dependency checking, argument …
Augmented Coding: an Experience Report
Last weekend I sat down with augmentcode.com to do some serious AI-assisted coding. The agent, “Auggie,” promises to automate coding tasks to a level I haven’t tried before. Gotta say, it was pretty good. I got farther than I would have alone. But hoooo, it is a new kind of effort and frustration. Overall impression: …