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 allWhen Code Becomes Cheap, What Are Software Companies Selling?
A software developer recently posed a question that stuck with me.
He makes his living selling software, and his concern about AI isn't primarily that AI will eventually write code better than he can.
His concern is that AI may remove the reason for people to buy some kinds of software at all…
Don't Pave the Cow Paths
One of the easiest mistakes in software modernization is also one of the oldest.
We take an existing process, application, or workflow and ask how to reproduce it with newer technology.
A manual procedure becomes a computer program.
A DOS program becomes a Windows application.
A Windows appl…
Why Being the Programmer in Charge Still Matters
AI keeps getting better at writing code.
That’s good news.
It can inspect a problem, trace through existing code, propose a solution, write the implementation, run tests, find mistakes, and come back with a better version faster than most of us could do the same work by hand.
But every time it…
Recent Field Notes
See allAI Could Have Built Us a Markdown Editor in an Afternoon
Long before we began the serious development work that eventually became PageSnip and ProHelp Studio, I had already become interested in the idea of adding a capable Markdown editor to some of our software.
So I did what many developers would do today.
I asked AI to help me build one.
It worke…
The 20 Rooms That Matter
More than forty years ago, I found myself sitting in one of those old corporate boardrooms that looked exactly like you would expect an old corporate boardroom to look.
Mahogany everywhere.
Big table.
Important people sitting around it.
I was there talking to a company about designing a hote…
Sometimes You Have to Stop the Train
PageSnip was getting close.
Not small-project close, where you’ve got three things left on a checklist and you’re pretty sure two of them are cosmetic.
This is a large application that has been growing for a long time. It does a lot. We’d already spent substantial time going back through older p…
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.