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
It started at midnight I had 24 hours, a free Replit subscription, and an idea: what if I could build something like Miro — but actually understand every line of code in it? The core problem I had to solve first Multiplayer sync sounds simple until you actually build it. The hard part isn't sending a canvas update — it's figuring out what to send. canvas.on('object:modified', (e) => { socket.emi
I write a lot of READMEs. I ship faster than I document. I work with AI agents that write code in seconds and READMEs in minutes, and somewhere between the first commit and the third refactor, the README I wrote on Tuesday stops matching the code I wrote on Friday. The install command says npm start. The package.json defines start:prod. Anyone copying that command would have failed instantly. I'd
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