Building with AI
Field notes from running a production system on LLMs every day — what actually cut a four-minute boot, why the optimization you wrote isn't the one that runs, and where today's tooling debates have played out before.
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A knowledge base is a graph, not a folder
Turning a manual into an agent's knowledge base isn't converting it to text — that flattens the thing that mattered. The power comes from the graph: the criteria that condition each other. How we built ours, what it caught, and the bench of specialized agents it produced.
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The optimization you wrote isn't the one that runs
I had the optimization written and approved, and a week later it still wasn't what ran. The fix wasn't a better design. It was making the trigger deterministic and leaving the judgment to the model.
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Anatomy of a four-minute boot
Where my Claude Code sessions actually spent their first four minutes, and what cut it to thirty seconds without losing any context. Hooks were three seconds of the problem. The model's diligence was the rest.
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Calibrate against your own voice
AI detectors flag non-native English as machine-written. callus scores your draft against your own voice instead. pip install callus.
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The Pixar precedent: vibe coding has been here before
Debates over disruptive tools follow a pattern. The vibe coding fight is at a recognisable stage of it. Notes from someone who passed through an earlier version of the same argument.