Practical guidance for people who use AI seriously.
Better questions produce better results. This site is built around that idea. Not prompt tricks, not hype, not benchmarks. Structured thinking, real workflows, and field-tested lessons from someone who uses these tools under load every day.
The Guides are the lessons. The Field Notes are the stories of how I learned them.
- Charles Edmonds
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Subscribe to Ask Good QuestionsRecent Guides
See allDo Not Let AI Build the Elephant in the Room
AI usually doesn't build the elephant in one move.
That's the dangerous part.
A project starts out with good intentions. The file structure makes sense. The responsibilities seem pretty clear. You've got a place for components, a place for state, a place for services, a place for utilities, mayb…
You Have to Invite the Vampire In
You've seen the scene in every vampire movie.
The vampire is standing outside the door, asking to be invited in.
The person inside hesitates. The vampire seems calm enough. Reasonable enough. Maybe even helpful.
But everyone watching knows the rule.
Don't do it.
Don't open the door.
Don'…
The Blue Water Design
One of the most useful shifts I've made in working with AI didn't come from a better prompt. It came from changing the assignment.
Early on, like a lot of developers, I would describe the kind of application I wanted and let the AI start building. Sometimes that meant a desktop app, sometimes a we…
Recent Field Notes
See allThe Elephant Does Not Walk Into the Room
I was working through a familiar kind of job recently: taking older working code and moving the parts worth saving into a newer, cleaner framework.
That sounds straightforward enough.
It usually isn't.
The old code has useful pieces in it. Some of it still represents decisions that were correc…
Do Not Give the Agent the Keys to the Kingdom
I've been thinking through agentic coding from a practical standpoint, not just from the usual "can it write code?" angle.
I can see the appeal.
If I'm paying for the tokens, I don't just want the agent to answer questions. I'd like it to do some real work. Create files. Run tests. Chase compile…
The day I realized AI was building daysailers
I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about the difference between software that looks like progress and software that's actually built to last.
Part of that came from watching how AI tends to behave when the assignment is too open.
For a while, I was doing what a lot of us do. I'd describe t…
I'm working on Real Programmers Use AI, a practical book for developers who want to use AI without losing control of their work. The guides and field notes here are drawn from the same material.