tooling
15 essays on this topic.
- Move the gate to the package manager
When a supply chain attack lands and the timeline is asking for discipline, the durable fix is one layer down — at the package manager, not at your attention span.
- The Thirty-Minute Fix for a Non-Existent Bug
If you are about to assert that a tool isn't installed, run `which` first. The check is one line. The cost of skipping it is a half-hour of defensive scaffolding for a problem that wasn't there.
- Lint as Cartography
The first time you run a quality gate against real data, the output is less about the gate and more about the data.
- Detect-and-Degrade
When your tool depends on the host, declare the dependency at the gate. Don't wrap it. Don't patch around it.
- A framework rejection is not the end of the evaluation
Forty thousand stars are voting on something. The framework verdict was correct. Closing the file was premature — the value still lives in the dependency tree.
- Programs Over Prompts
The temptation in agent systems is to make everything a prompt. But most of the work is deterministic — and deterministic work deserves code, not suggestions.
- Stop Asking Which AI Model Is Better. Ask Which Phase.
The planning/execution split is more useful than any benchmark comparison.
- Progressive disclosure in MCP tools
When building MCP servers, search should return scannable summaries — not full content. Let the model decide what to read.
- The Nag Tax
When building automation around a third-party app, the first question to answer is: what's the one thing this app does that nothing else can replicate? That feature becomes the tax you pay on everything else.
- Benchmark Your Research Stack
Running 10 real queries through 5 tools revealed that theoretical routing rules have systematic gaps — and the surprises were more useful than the confirmations.
- Eliminate the Reminder, Don't Schedule It
When you catch yourself setting a reminder to check something later, that's usually a signal that a tool is failing to report what it should.
- You Are the Bottleneck in Your Own Agentic Workflow
Adding more AI tools doesn't help if you're still the bus between them.
- When Better Is Worse
Upgrading to a more capable model made my tool sixty times slower. The lesson isn't about models — it's about the difference between capability and fit.
- Instructions Don't Enforce Behavior. Templates Do.
Why the structure of an output matters more than the instructions that produce it.
- 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.