#2026

We are becoming Harness Engineers

The role of a software engineer is shifting. Not toward writing more code but toward building the environment that makes agents reliable.

Think about what you actually do with Claude Code or Codex today: you configure AGENTS.md files, set up MCP servers, write skills and hooks, build feedback loops and tune sub-agents.

You’re not writing as much of the software anymore. You’re engineering the harness around the thing that writes the software.

Podsync - I finally built my podcast track syncer

After years of failed attempts, I built podsync — a tool that auto-aligns double-ender podcast recordings — this time with AI and in Rust.

AI model choices 2026-01

Which AI model do I use?

This is a common question I get asked, but models evolve so rapidly that I never felt like I could give an answer that would stay relevant for more than a month or two.

This year, I finally feel like I have a stable set of model choices that consistently give me good results. I’m jotting it down here to share more broadly and to trace how my own choices evolve over time.

#2025

Forking subagents in an AI coding session with tmux

A pragmatic, flexible, and powerful tmux script that spawns an interactive “subagent” window from your current CLI agent, seeded with recent transcript as context.

AI is a motorbike for the mind

AI is a motorbike for the mind: it offers effortless speed, but risks mental atrophy. In an era where anyone can go fast, the true skill is no longer the throttle, it's the brake.

Combating AI coding atrophy with Rust

If you're worried AI will rot your coding brain, try learning a language that forces you to think differently — Android devs should pick Rust!

AI-assisted coding → Vibe Engineering ← Vibe Coding

Three ways to code with AI: assisted coding keeps you in control, vibe coding lets AI run wild, and vibe engineering puts AI to work inside your design constraints.

Go with monthly AI subscriptions friends

Cognitive Burden

The moment AI 'clicked' for me: I realized it wasn’t about finishing the work faster, it was about finishing less exhausted. Lower cognitive burden quietly multiplies output.

Standardize with ⌘ O ⌘ P to reduce cognitive load

Here's a quick productivity tip that has helped me a lot when working across multiple apps.

Product vs Model Innovation

In the AI boom, successful companies innovate faster on product, not models. Cursor 2.0 proves this.

Agent Skills: How is it different from command and other tools?

Skills, the new feature by Claude, isn't revolutionary, but it's an intuitive take on providing a first-class primitive for just-in-time context injection.

We are becoming Software Conductors

As AI reshapes work, we need to shift from a task-centric view to a system-centric one. What does that mean for software engineers? This post explores seven critical skills we'll need to develop as our role transforms from code writers to system conductors — more like musical conductors than musicians.

Sorting Prompts - LLMs are not wrong you just caught them mid thought

LLMs are not wrong that often, you're just forcing them to answer mid-thought. Mike Caulfield has a clever techinque or prompt that will help you get much better results with your AI searching.

Three important things to get right for successful AI Coding

This is a post to help developers struggling with inconsistent AI coding results. There's just three things you need to focus on today: Context, prompts, and chunking. This post helps you understand how to effectively nail these three factors.

Vibe-engineering a Firefox add-on: Container Traffic Control

I shipped a respectable, high quality software Firefox add-on by vibe-coding end to end.

Terminal command that tells you which USB-C cable is bad

A quick cli script to tell you if your usb-c cable is bad

reclaiming em-en dashing back from AI and lowercasing

A personal (and slightly petty) manifesto to reclaim em/en dashes and lowercase writing from the clutches of AI-generated sameness. let the robots not have all the fun.

Getting Into Flow State with Agentic Coding

A pragmatic guide to finding your focus and achieving a deep state of flow while coding with AI agents.

AI Programming Paradigms: A Timeline

How AI programming evolved from autocomplete to agentic coding - and what's next (simul-agentic coding)

Keep your AGENTS.md in sync — One Source of Truth for AI Instructions

Consolidate AI system instructions under AGENTS.md and configure every tool to use the same one.

AI won't replace good engineers - it'll make them invaluable

Why the best engineers will become even more valuable in the AI era. Humans still have a part to play in the world of AI.

AI & Software Engineering: Time for optimism

Software engineers: Learn faster and become indispensable with AI. Stop fearing job loss and use AI as a powerful learning tool to enhance your skills. By embracing AI as a learning partner rather than fearing it as a replacement, software engineers can position themselves at the center of technical decision-making and thrive in an AI-augmented future.

Age of the AI phone

Brief thought on how the next phone that'll win the market is going to to be the one that gets AI right

tags

kau.sh | Ai

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