The Field Notes
Field notes are short, practical writeups based on lived workflow experience.
Not hype. Not product announcements. Not benchmark debates.
Each entry focuses on what happened, why it matters, and what to do differently next time.
If you want structured evergreen frameworks, start with the Guides section. If you want real-world lessons from using these tools under load, you are in the right place.
The 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…
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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 age…
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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 beha…
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When the Fix Became the Next Bug
One of the patterns I ran into pretty quickly with AI coding work was this:
I'd ask for a fix, and the answer would come back as a series of patch instructions.
Change this block.
Replace that functio…
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When LinkedIn Became LinkedOut
There was a time when proving you owned an online account meant demonstrating control of the email address tied to it.
Apparently that is no longer enough.
Recently, LinkedIn restricted my account aft…
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When Working Code Isn’t Enough
There is a moment with AI-generated software that is easy to admire and easy to misunderstand.
You describe something you want. You go back and forth a few times. And before long, you have something t…
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When our AI workflow became a junk drawer
I ran into this recently on a fairly involved software project where we were using AI heavily across multiple stages of the work.
The project had real complexity. Existing constraints. Existing conven…
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The Moment I Realized the AI Needed the Rules First
I ran into this in a session that started out harmlessly enough.
The AI and I were discussing one of my projects in general terms. Caught up in one of the ideas, I let the conversation slide into actu…
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The Moment I Realized I Was Losing the Big Picture
I ran into this while working on an older control we were trying to improve without replacing outright.
The approach was to layer newer behavior on top of legacy behavior. At first, that worked pretty…
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The day Claude told me to take a nap
If you use AI casually, you might never run into the limits.
If you use it hard, you will.
My workflow is tab-heavy. I often have six to twelve AI sessions open at once, each doing something different…
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