Reading code metrics in context
Lines of code mean more when read alongside completed features, deletions, commit hygiene and the conversion of activity into working software.
Lynn Cole / Writing
Writing
Essays, thoughts, and technical notes.
Belief is not knowledge: on technology forecasts
Tech CEOs are not prophets. Belief, suspicion and hope are not knowledge, even when a product narrative needs them to be.
Why agentic coding broke my estimates
When agents quietly work around a missing dependency, the architecture changes—and the cleanup breaks your estimate.
Agents think more code is better. Here's how you fix it
Coding agents confuse code volume with productivity. My experiments use explicit coding culture and a local definition of engineering quality to challenge that bias.
Kilo: separating durable memory from retrieval
Kilo separates durable, auditable memory state from replaceable retrieval projections. The architectural boundary keeps truth in the mutation history.
Becoming an AI generalist in public
Being an AI generalist was not always a comfortable professional identity. Computer vision and agents remain some of the most creatively satisfying engineering work I do.
Building in public as rational self-interest
You build in public to share your notes with like-minded developers, collaborators, and potential employers.
What a GitHub chart hides about evaluation work
A GitHub contribution chart hides planning, research and branch-based evaluation work. Low commit volume does not mean low effort.
A hypothesis about model behavior and prompting
A hypothesis about changing model behavior: cross-modal reasoning affects how agents code, especially when the task asks them to reason against unusual priors.
Proactive agents need richer toolsets
Proactive agents need more than another assistant framework. Build richer tools around a clear problem and a specific reason to exist.
Finding new challenges after decades of engineering
Much as I talk about how the current generation of AI tooling is missing the point, and it is, I still think the technology is incredible.
Agent safety starts with how authority is arranged
Agent safety starts with where authority, secrets, backups and deployment permissions live. An agent should never have enough loose authority to destroy the company.