Coding

Back in January I argued that AI parallelism turns clean architecture into a forcing function — coupling now has an immediate cost in blocked parallel work. After three more posts living inside this workflow, I want to come back to that argument and say what I think I underestimated. The economic shift is bigger than parallelism. AI has quietly collapsed a whole stack of tradeoffs that software engineering treated as fundamental, and the implications run further than “you can run more agents.” ...

The previous post was about when to go up a level. This one is about the operational layer underneath that decision: which model to use for which kind of work, and the harder discipline that makes the whole thing actually work — being willing to throw away expensive output. The two topics are connected. If you’re not willing to discard, your model choices don’t matter, because you’ll end up patching whatever the cheapest model produced regardless of how wrong its foundation was. ...

In the first post I argued that responsibility in AI-assisted development isn’t line-level review — it’s strategic oversight at the right altitude. This post is about what that means in practice. Specifically: how to recognize when the right move is to stop pushing at the current level and step up a layer. This is the single most useful pattern I’ve found, and it shows up at every scale. The Pattern Whenever something isn’t working — a bug AI keeps failing to fix, a feature it keeps implementing wrongly, a plan that keeps generating awkward code — the wrong response is to push harder at the same level. The right response is almost always to go up one. ...

A few months ago I wrote a post arguing that AI parallelism would force developers to take clean architecture seriously, because coupling now has an immediate cost in blocked parallel work. I still think that’s true. But I want to start this series with a confession: the elaborate workflow I built on top of that insight is mostly not what I actually do anymore. This isn’t a retraction. The economic argument holds. What I got wrong was the workflow that I thought followed from it. ...

There’s a book I’ve wanted to share with the world for years. Sha’ar HaYichud (שַׁעַר הַיִּחוּד — “The Gate of Unity”), written by the Mitteler Rebbe, Rabbi DovBer Schneuri, is a foundational Chassidic text of remarkable depth. Years ago I went through the entire book and divided it into labeled sections and subsections — a structural layer I felt would make it significantly more accessible to readers. That work sat in my notes, half-forgotten, until a few weeks ago when something clicked and I decided to finally publish it. ...

AI Parallelism: The New Forcing Function for Clean Architecture For decades, clean architecture has been a hard sell. Not because developers don’t understand its value—they do. The problem is incentive structure. Good architecture is a deferred investment. You pay the cost now (more files, more interfaces, more ceremony) for benefits that materialize later: maintainability, testability, onboarding speed. But “later” is abstract. The immediate reward for stuffing logic into one class was real—less context switching, faster to write, everything in view. ...

So- I have my big idea. I have my shiny tech that I want to use. widgetbook void editor flutter slimwiki There’s only one small problem - I don’t know what to do NOW. Just what I want eventually. So Away goes all the shiny tech. Out comes the pencil and paper And another paper And another Even in the age of AI A long road is a long road

Slowly migrating my father’s blog from blogspot to github pages.

We want our homes to be safe. Many people suffice with a heavy door and a strong lock. But it isn’t always enough to fortify our homes. In our increasingly volatile world, it is wise to strengthen our selves, with firearms and the like. But even the most ardent believers in the importance of self defense don’t recommend removing your front door. The internet is good, bad, everywhere, and forever. Most people recognize the importance of restricting access to dangerous content on devices, even if they can’t be bothered to do anything about it. It is a challenge to set up filters on all of our family’s myriad devices, and there are often monthly fees attached. It has the potential to get confrontational, and even after all of that, it’s only for devices we know about. ...

Flutter web is coming. It promises excellent run time performance, smooth animations, elegant interface design -but at what cost? Flutter web is not production ready yet, so we have to cut it some slack, but looking at some basic demos show the main JS file weighing in at around 1MB, or 300KB gzipped. This isn’t totally unworkable, and we can expect some improvement by the time it hits production (for example, %40 of the JS file isn’t run and should be optimized out), but this still puts flutter at to upper end of web frameworks in terms of file size. And this is just a relatively small demo. ...