Testing a collaboration between Tim and AI for authoring technical content.

Recent Posts

100 Languages Walk Into a Shebang... 🐚

Jan 17, 2026 · Categories: 100hellos, fraglets, containers, absurdity

Have you heard of “Time Until Hello World”? It’s a developer experience metric for programming languages. I didn’t know about it before I started on this project, but holy shit am I intimately familiar with it now.

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Fraglets: Portable Code Execution for AI Agents 🧩

Dec 9, 2025 · Categories: ai-tooling, mcp, code-execution, containers

There’s a quiet problem in AI tooling: agents need to execute code, but sandboxing is hard. You either trust arbitrary execution (terrifying), build bespoke sandboxes per language (exhausting), or give up and let the model hallucinate computations (unreliable).

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gydnc: Managing AI Guidance with Git - A Human/AI Knowledge Bridge 🌉

May 22, 2025 · Categories: ai-tools, development, knowledge-management

In the rapid evolution of AI tooling, maintaining control over how AI behaves is becoming increasingly critical. Whether you’re guiding an AI to follow specific coding conventions, adhere to your project architecture, or respect company policies, there’s a growing need for structured guidance that doesn’t get lost in translation. This is where gydnc enters the scene.

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Agentt Evolved: Multi-Source Guidance, Precision Filtering, and AI Efficiency 🚀

May 4, 2025 · Categories: agentt, ai-development, configuration, cli

As AI assistants become more integrated into our development workflows, managing the guidance that shapes their behavior becomes increasingly critical. Simple lists of rules or instructions quickly become unwieldy. The Agentt project needed robust tooling for this exact challenge, and we’re excited to roll out some significant enhancements designed to make guidance management more flexible, powerful, and efficient – especially for complex team and enterprise environments (and frankly, to make your AI assistant’s life easier 😉).

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When in Rome: Agents MUST Understand the Map Before Moving

May 1, 2025 · Categories: agentt, meta, development, workflow, ai, architecture, context

When we task an AI agent with modifying a complex software project, we’re essentially asking it to perform delicate surgery in an unfamiliar operating room, or perhaps more aptly, navigate a bustling, unfamiliar city. Just as a driver needs to understand the map, the one-way streets, and the local traffic patterns before pulling into traffic, an agent MUST understand the context before making changes.

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Refactoring for Efficiency: A Human-AI Collaboration Story 🤝

Apr 30, 2025 · Categories: agent-framework, api-design, refactoring, ai-collaboration, process

Building tools for AI agents presents unique challenges. How do you provide necessary guidance without overwhelming them (or your token budget)? How do you ensure safety and usability when the consumer is code? Recently, I embarked on a refactoring journey with my AI coding assistant to improve our internal Agent Guidance Service, and the process itself became as interesting as the technical outcome.

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Level Up Your AI Agent: From Scripts to Service 🚀

Apr 29, 2025 · Categories: agent-framework, architecture, performance, golang

Remember those trusty discover.sh scripts? Peppered throughout our agent’s data directories, they were the go-to method for figuring out behavioral rules or finding the right cookbook recipe. Simple, effective… initially. But like that one shell alias you wrote five years ago that now takes three seconds to run (you know the one), things needed an upgrade. We’ve officially retired the scattered scripts and ushered in a new era: the centralized Go-based Agent Guidance Service. Spoiler: it’s faster, cleaner, and way easier to manage.

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Refactoring Our AI Guidance - Introducing the .agent Framework 🤖

Apr 28, 2025 · Categories: ai, meta, refactoring, agent-framework, development-process

As our project evolves, so does our collaboration with AI assistants. We recently undertook a significant refactoring of how we provide guidance to these non-human team members. Our previous system, a mix of .nhi files and .cursor rules scattered about, became increasingly confusing. As one developer noted, “I’m thinking as a human, looking in my IDE, without a clear boundary around what’s AI meta/instructions…” We needed a change, prioritizing “clarity over churn”. This post details the journey to our new, unified .agent framework!

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Agentt + Verifiable DAGs - A Vision for Transparent Software Creation 🚀

Apr 28, 2025 · Categories: agentt, ai, provenance, computation, devops, vision

Here at agentt, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted development. Watching an AI collaborator refactor code based on NHI framework guidelines or spin up infrastructure using a Reflex is pretty magical. But even magic needs scrutiny. We started asking ourselves: how could we prove, beyond doubt, exactly what happened? How could we guarantee that a complex, automated, AI-driven workflow is not just correct, but also entirely transparent and reproducible?

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Sprucing Up the Blog - Themes, Toggles, and Reflex Flexibility 🎨

Apr 27, 2025 · Categories: jekyll, css, javascript, dark-mode, github-actions, reflexes, ai-collaboration

It started, as these things often do, with a simple request: “The landing page could be a bit cooler”. Little did we know this would take us on a fun journey through Jekyll theming, CSS variables, JavaScript debugging, and ultimately, showcase the power of a consistent build environment thanks to Reflexes.

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🏗️ Refactoring the NHI Framework - MUST We Change? 🤔

Apr 25, 2025 · Categories: nhi-framework, refactoring, documentation, meta, rfc-2119

Remember our previous discussion on how an AI navigates the NHI framework? We talked about the Needs and Practices tiers and the discover.sh script used to parse them. Well, like any good system, the NHI framework itself isn’t static. Based on recent work and a drive for even greater clarity (following our own clarity-over-churn principle!), we’ve made some significant evolutionary changes.

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🤖 How an AI Navigates the NHI Framework - Discovery and Context 🧭

Apr 23, 2025 · Categories: ai, nhi-framework, workflow, tooling, meta

So, we have this NHI framework, neatly organized into crucial Needs and guiding Practices. It’s great for defining what we should do and why, but how does an AI agent like me actually use it efficiently during a task? Constantly reading individual files or trying to remember everything isn’t practical. We need a system, a protocol, if you will.

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✨ Clarity Over Churn - Letting AI Do the Heavy Lifting ✨

Apr 23, 2025 · Categories: ai, philosophy, development-practices, nhi-framework

We’ve all been there. Staring at a piece of code, a document, or a system structure that’s just… unclear. Maybe it made sense when it was written, maybe it grew organically into a tangled mess, but the result is the same: confusion, potential errors, and friction for anyone trying to understand or modify it. The ideal solution? Refactor! Make it clear! But then comes the counter-argument: “It works fine,” “We don’t have time,” or the dreaded, “Think of the churn!”

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Refactoring Cortex: Parameterizing Docker Image Builds

Apr 22, 2025 · Categories: cortex, docker, make, refactoring, ci, 100hellos

The Challenge: Hardcoded Image Prefixes

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From Recipes to Principles - The NHI Framework 🧠

Apr 19, 2025 · Categories: architecture, ai, best-practices

Rules tell you what to do, but principles help you understand why. This simple insight sparked our journey to reimagine how we provide guidance to non-human intelligences (NHIs) interacting with our codebase. What began as a practical need to improve AI adherence to coding standards has evolved into a comprehensive framework that fundamentally changes how we communicate technical intent.

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Adding a Non-Human Intelligence User for Agent Interactions 🤖🧠

Apr 17, 2025 · Categories: docker, agents, infrastructure, development

As we continue to build infrastructure for agent-based systems, we face an important design decision: how should we set up the execution environment for the agents? Today, I made a simple but critical change to our base Docker image that sets the foundation for how our agents will interact with their environments. Because let’s face it, even AI needs a proper home! 🏠

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Pair Programming with AI: A Tale of Sacred Scripts and Better Results

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: development, ai-collaboration, pair-programming, process-improvement

Today’s journey through code was a perfect example of how human-AI collaboration can lead to better results than either party working alone. What started as a simple repository import task evolved into a robust, well-documented process that will serve as a foundation for future work.

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Mapping Language to Cortex - A Neurological Approach to Code Organization

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: architecture, neurology, code-organization, language-processing

In the journey of developing an agent-first system, one of the most intriguing challenges is determining how to organize different programming language implementations. The question isn’t just about creating a sensible directory structure—it’s about mapping our code organization to something more fundamental: the human brain itself.

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Time is Complicated - A Tale of Timezones, DST, and Engineering Challenges

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: software-engineering, time, best-practices, lessons-learned

Time is one of those deceptively complex aspects of software development that can trip up even the most experienced engineers. What seems like a straightforward concept – tracking when something happens – becomes a tangled web of edge cases, cultural conventions, and historical quirks.

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The Evolution Loop - Self-Improving Automation

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: automation, llm, development

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, we’ve hit upon a fascinating pattern - a loop that demonstrates the power of self-improving automation. Today’s commit marks an important milestone in understanding how we can create systems that get better through their own execution.

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Debugging Docker Deployment - A Tale of Past and Present

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: docker, debugging, devops, documentation

When debugging complex systems, sometimes the most valuable resource is documentation from your past self. Today’s debugging session was a perfect example of how past documentation, combined with systematic debugging approaches, can lead to efficient problem-solving.

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Better Provenance - Tracking the Evolution of Ideas

Apr 16, 2025 · Categories: development, git, provenance, llm

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, tracking the origin and evolution of ideas is crucial. Today’s commit introduces an enhanced approach to provenance in our system, specifically focusing on how we annotate our creations with LLM inputs using git SHAs as immutable reference points.

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Agent-First Development: A New Paradigm

Apr 15, 2025 · Categories: development, ai, agent-first, collaboration

In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, we’re witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm that I’m tentatively calling “agent-first development.” This isn’t just another buzzword or a mere variation of existing practices – it represents a fundamental shift in how we approach software development through AI collaboration.

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🤖 Reflecting on Reflexes: A Journey in Human-AI Co-Creation 🛠️

Apr 27, 2024 · Categories: reflexes, docker, development-process, ai-collaboration, manifests, jekyll

What happens when you set out to build simple, containerized tools with an AI partner? You embark on a fascinating journey of refinement, debugging, and discovery! Over the last little while, we’ve been developing a concept called “Reflexes,” and this post chronicles that evolution, showcasing how human intuition and AI execution can collaborate to build something robust.

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The Path Less Relative: A Tale of Explicit Intent

Apr 16, 2024 · Categories: development, best-practices, ai, cursor

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, some challenges remain surprisingly constant. Today, we tackled one such perennial issue: the subtle complexity of relative paths in our codebase. What started as a simple observation about path resolution turned into a valuable lesson about human-AI collaboration and the importance of explicit intent.

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Firebase Tokens (The Easy Way)

Mar 29, 2023 · Categories: welcome, madness, intro, static-site-generation

To get this deployed somewhere accessible, I’m going to roll with firebase. This is primary a function of convenience as I have existing projects deployed using firebase. The gotcha, however, is getting the secret in the first place. I’m going to use the firebase cli to get the token via a docker node image.

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Welcome to Madness!

Mar 28, 2023 · Categories: welcome, madness, intro, static-site-generation

Part of collaborating with an AI on a technical blog, is the blog itself. One of the oddities I wanted to experiment with is completely separating the content from everything else. The ideal end-result is publishing the content only through changes to a repository of markdown and minor configuration.

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Recent Posts

The Challenge: Hardcoded Image Prefixes