Development

It’s everywhere. It’s the new hotness. If you’re not doing SDD are you even vibing dude? I first came across the idea from a software library with no code which describes a time conversion library as a markdown spec + test suite, in sufficient detail to allow a coding agent to implement it. My initial thought was that this seemed a cool idea, but not something that would scale. Next I came across Software Factories And The Agentic Moment via Simon Willison’s commentary How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code. StrongDM released Attractor, their coding agent, by only open sourcing the spec. The intent is that you just get Claude Code/whatever to do the actual implementation ...

A guide on getting productive with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. This is an update to my original post from mid-2025, incorporating newer patterns around plugins, issue tracking, and skills. Installation You’ll need an either an API key or a Pro/Max subscription. On first start, claude will ask you which you want - I recommend the latter to avoid unmanaged costs. To use a subscription, be logged in to https://claude.ai in a browser and follow the instructions. ...

On Friday Simon Willison published a look at Jesse Vincent’s1 Superpowers plugin for Claude You can read Simon’s and Jesse’s posts to see what this super cool plugin does, but I wanted to understand how to create a plugin and this is quick summary of my notes. First up, Jesse uses a complex structure with three repos: Marketplace Plugin Skills It’s setup this way to allow for contributions, but if you just want to play with creating a plugin, it’s not needed. ...

Trying out a new format this week. Instead of links, here’s some shorts. Too little for a post, too much for a link. This week we have Power variation in AI data centres Adopting new CLI tools Historical maps Power variation in AI data centres (Link requires registration and full article isn’t free, but there’s a massive preview which is all I have access to) A new to me issue with AI workloads - training runs are very, very spiky in their power use. ...

The Anthropic Cookbook is an excellent resource for learning how to write LLM code and it’s continually being updated, most recently with example code for agents. The Cookbook comes as a set of Jupyter notebooks. I prefer Marimo to Jupyter, mainly because it supports reactive cell reloading i.e. if you change an earlier notebook cell that a later cell depends on, the chain of dependencies is calculated and everything is re-run correctly which saves a lot of mental energy and stupid mistakes when working with notebooks. ...

Note: This post has been replaced by Claude Code - The Missing Manual, which includes updated patterns around plugins, issue tracking, and skills. Notes that I wrote for work on how to get started with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic code tool. Anthropic’s own documentation is good, but I wanted a single page that I could share with people to help them get rapidly up to speed. Once past this stage, their Claude code best practices page is excellent. ...

Some AI development resources this week… How to Build an AI Code Agent Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent. He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same. It’s worth reading both Claude Code Best Practices Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices. Of note: Claude can (and should!) use the architect/plan then code model that Aider makes explicit. Telling Claude to read code/docs, then plan, then code, then commit gives better results than just telling it to write code Ask Claude to review things (e.g. the CLAUDE.md hint files) and suggest improvements. Repeat. (As an aside, the Anthropic workbench can improve general prompts) Telling Claude to ’think’, ’think harder’ etc results in more thinking tokens being used Clear context frequently (/clear) - usable context window is smaller than the advertised max The model of asking Claude to review and improve its work (or human starting points) repeatedly was not obvious to me ...