developer-experience
8 essays on this topic.
- Your AI Tools Should Watch You Fumble
The best time to improve a CLI isn't when it breaks — it's when you review the breakage log at the end of a work session.
- When Intelligence Becomes Infrastructure
What changes when LLMs stop being the special thing and become just another software component? The answer is: everything about how you build.
- Your Tool Shouldn't Know What to Ignore
Configuration that belongs to the data shouldn't live in the tool. .gitignore figured this out thirty years ago.
- Expansion, Not Speedup
The real ROI of AI coding isn't doing the same work faster. It's doing work that wasn't worth doing before.
- Skills as Files
The simplest agent architecture might already be the right one: give the agent a file explaining how to do something, and let it read when needed.
- Rules Decay, Hooks Don't
The difference between writing down a rule and making the system enforce it — illustrated by a 15-line hook.
- Agent-First CLI Design: TTY Detection as Philosophy
The primary user of my CLI tools isn't me anymore. Designing for that changes everything about how output should work.
- AX: Agent Experience Is the New DX
Developer experience became a competitive moat in the API era. Agent experience is next. Most tools aren't designed for it yet.