Articles, notes and updates on the agent, the tools, and the craft of building software with AI.
Or: why one tired agent is worse than five focused ones
You're sitting in Elyra, mid-conversation with the model. You need to explain something a little complicated – maybe paste in a stack trace, sketch out an architecture, or just write a prompt that needs more than a line or two to land properly.
There's something satisfying about a cluster of small releases. No grand reveal, no version bump that demands a blog post all its own — just steady improvements, each one earning its keep. Elyra shipped v0.5.5 through v0.5.8 in a single day, and the changes range from invisible plumbing to features you'll actually type out loud.
You spend a lot of time looking at your terminal. Probably more than you'd like to admit. So it feels a little silly that for most of us, the answer to "how should this look?" has been the same dark-on-darker default for years.
There's a familiar little ritual at the start of every Laravel project. You run laravel new, pick a starter kit, brew a coffee — and then spend the next hour squinting at unfamiliar files, trying to work out how the thing actually fits together.
Most conversations with an AI coding assistant are just that — one long conversation. You describe what you need, the agent pokes around in your files, writes a bit of code, and you both move on with your day. For small tasks, that's perfectly fine. But once a job starts pulling in several concerns at once — is it correct, is it secure, are there tests, does it fit the architecture?
You're typing into a TUI. You want a newline, not a submit, so you reach for Shift+Enter — and the thing submits anyway. You frown, try again a little slower. Same result. Eventually you start questioning your life choices.
There's a particular kind of pleasure in discovering a tool that doesn't try to be the center of your universe. No splash screen. No onboarding wizard with seven slides. No friendly little robot asking if you'd like to "upgrade to Pro" before you've even finished your coffee. Just a binary that does the thing, gets out of the way, and lets you keep typing.