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 allThe Demo Is Part of the Design
The Demo Is Part of the Design
Most software demonstrations are built to show what a product can do.
We assemble a few examples, populate the screens with believable information, and walk someone through the features. If everything works, we consider the demonstration successful.
But what if w…
Your AI Account Is Not a Backup
AI accounts have quietly become something they were never really designed to be.
Repositories of work.
Not source-code repositories, at least not usually.
Something less obvious.
A long-running AI account can contain months or years of conversations about architecture, design decisions, debu…
Trust the Artifact, Not the Report
There's a point in almost every AI programming session when the AI tells you what it did.
It fixed the problem.
It changed the requested files.
It ran the tests.
The tests passed.
It created the package.
It returned the completed work.
That report can be useful.
It can also be comple…
Recent Field Notes
See allThe Demo That Passed Every Test
The Demo That Passed Every Test
One of the more interesting things about working with AI coding agents is how quickly they can convince you that something is finished.
You describe a feature. The agent writes the code, builds the application, runs the tests, and reports that everything passed…
When the Account Locked the Work Away
A developer I know recently found himself locked out of his AI account.
The immediate problem was two-factor authentication.
Something in the authentication process wasn't working, and he couldn't get back into the account.
That alone is frustrating.
But what caught my attention wasn't reall…
The Fix That Was Byte-for-Byte Identical
The AI returned the repair.
The filename said it was fixed.
The report said it was fixed.
The SHA-256 said otherwise.
Not almost the same.
Not a repair that failed one test.
Not a build that contained the wrong version.
The supposedly repaired ZIP was byte-for-byte identical to the ori…
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.