In my previous article about treating architecture documentation as a first-class asset, I had a great discussion in the comments about enforcing architectural rules. I promised to share materials from my recent Google Developer Groups workshop. The workshop is now finished! Here is the story of how I built an AI Quality Gate, how it helped me solve the internal "CEO, CTO, CFO, CISO" conflict, and
More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively
In my previous article, I documented how I installed Terraform on macOS using Homebrew and fixed a Zsh autocomplete issue. In this article, I am going to be using terraform to provision, update, and destroy a simple set of infrastructure using the sample configuration provided by hashicorp The goal is to understand the basic Terraform workflow: Write configuration Authenticate to Google Cloud Ini
On April 30th I got an email from Google about something called GEAR, their new program for building AI agents using ADK, the Agent Development Kit. I signed up, watched the intro video, and had a strange feeling of recognition. The pattern was familiar. Define tools. Write descriptions. Connect an AI model to those tools. Let the model decide which tool to call based on what the user asks. I buil
VotePath -- an AI-powered multilingual voting guide for first-time voters. The Problem: Why Don't People Vote? What is VotePath? 🤖 Gemini-Powered AI Assistant: A conversational AI built with the Google Gemini API that answers specific election queries in real-time. 🛠️ The Tech Stack Building the UI components and wiring up the Gemini SDK went smoothly using an intent-driven development approach.
For years, the dream of a truly autonomous, always-on AI assistant has felt just out of reach — a concept relegated to-fi or limited by fragile, stateless nature of most chat interfaces. We’ve grown accustomed to assistants that forget us the moment we close the browser tab. But what if we could change the fundamental architecture? What if we could build an AI agent that doesn't just converse, but
Have you ever looked at code you wrote six months ago and thought: "Who wrote this monster?"? Relax, it happens to all of us. In software engineering, writing code that a machine understands is the easy part. The real challenge is writing code that other humans (including your future self) can understand, maintain, and scale. This is exactly where Software Design Principles come into play. In this
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about