---
title: "If You Never Do Anything Else to Fix Your Prompts, Do This One Thing"
description: "Why do LLMs confidently invent APIs that have never existed in the history of the universe? It is not a memory defect. Agents hallucinated because they were committed to the prompt—and Fernando Flores sol...
---
title: "What LLMs 'Know' That You Don't Know They Know: Stop Inventing Prompt DSLs and Ride 50 Years of Unix Pre-Training Gravity"
description: "Why did a 1976 Makefile (Part 3.6) and a 1983 Unix init.d directory (Part 3.7) outperform 2,000 lines of English prompt rules? Because prompt engineeri...
---
title: "Surviving the 200k-Token Lobotomy: How Unix init.d and 'Memento' Made My AI Coding Agent Immune to Context Compaction"
description: Why host auto-compaction silently lobotomizes long-running AI coding sessions, and how 1983 SysV init.d runlevel files, Memento tattoos, and fork/wait subag...
# “It Worked” Is Not the Same as “It Can Run in Production”
You are probably the kind of reader I have in mind if:
- you already use ChatGPT, Claude, or another LLM;
- you have used GitHub or built a simple automation;
- AI agents and automation interest you, but governance or approval design is n...
I have used Redis on almost every backend project I can remember. Caching, sessions, rate limiting, queues, the occasional bit of temporary state that felt too awkward to put in Postgres. At some point it stopped being a decision and became a default.
About 3 months ago, I came across Dragonfly, wh...
---
title: "Nudging with Questions: Why Telling Your AI What to Fix Triggers an Apology Death Spiral (And How to Advance Juniors)"
description: What I learned mentoring juniors for four decades seems to apply to today's agentic coding: why barking code fixes triggers sycophantic panic, and how Socra...
---
title: "The Physics of Socratic Prompting: Somatic Recoil, Chess Alpha-Beta, & The NLP Meta-Model"
description: Why scalar RLHF fails at credit assignment, why barking direct code fixes turns you into an exhausted human compiler, and how Socratic questioning plus topological scars prune doomed s...
There's a new kind of technical debt, and it doesn't come from cutting corners. It comes from reaching for the most impressive tool in the room.
Call it resume-driven AI engineering: picking an agent framework, a vector database, or a multi-model orchestration layer because it looks great on a CV, ...
I used to joke that the history of frontend development could be retraced by following the argument of who owned the state. And the truth is both sides have gone back and forth on this over the years. We started on the document web where state was on the server. Then we added JavaScript and Applets ...