After looking at the fourth PR for our service from someone we’d never even talked to and seeing the code comments that looked like Christmas trees, I thought that we have to create some rules so we don’t have to even bother reviewing the AI-generated slop nobody bothered reviewing before sending it to us. I posted a question in our team channel, and everyone agreed with my proposition of drafting an “away-team” guide. Ironically, I did use AI for that. However, I mostly used it for two...
14 days ago • 5 min read
A week ago I finally got access to publish my app to production in the Google Play Store. Getting 12 Android testers to keep the app installed for at least 14 days was much harder than I imagined, but it finally happened. I still haven’t published it though because I’m probably overthinking it I knew those “testers” didn’t actually test much. As always, I had to rely on my friend Codex and its gpt-5.6-sol model. I gave Codex a terrible test plan I just said: Can you start the emulator and do...
21 days ago • 5 min read
There’s a Russian saying: “Measure seven times, cut once.” It generally means that spending more time preparing helps you achieve a better result in the end. I wanted to see if the same logic applies to AI agents. So I gave two agents using the same model the same task, a real one-hour deadline, and almost the same prompt. Except one agent was told to plan first. Then I compared what they built… The experiment In the last couple of weeks, I’ve wanted to play “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.”...
28 days ago • 7 min read
A couple days ago I had a design review for a new capability in our system. Then I had AI turn the design doc into tasks and send agents to work on what they could in parallel to unblock other tasks. They created code reviews for me to look at and it was terrifying. No, all the tests were written and passing, and technically all these PRs were “green” and ready to merge. But the code quality wasn’t up to the standards we’d expect from a human during peer review. The AI agents were perfectly...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Last weekend, I hit 0% usage on my $100-a-month Codex plan. I bought another $30 in credits. Those disappeared within two hours. I still had projects I wanted to work on, so my choices seemed to be: Spend even more money. Wait for my limits to reset. Find another model. Then I saw this tweet: Matt @rich_matt Using /goal with DeepSeek V4 Flash in Codex feels like robbing a data center 10:25 PM • Aug 3, 2026 73 Retweets 2797 Likes Read 38 replies That was intriguing enough, so I had to try it....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I’ve been back at work after surgery for just over two months (though it feels much longer), and I noticed something that made me pause. I don’t think I’ve written a single line of code myself. It’s Claude via kiro-cli now. No token limits. AWS runs the meter, I run the prompts. Sometimes it’s great. When you already know what needs to be done and what “good” looks like, you can get to a decent implementation in a couple iterations. But lately I’ve had this nagging feeling that I’m not...
8 months ago • 5 min read
It was my first on-call shift since I’ve been back after surgery. I was also onboarding a new person to be on-call, which is always a fun combo: you’re trying to look calm while quietly hoping nothing explodes. On Wednesday night I went to bed early, around 9pm, trying to catch up on sleep. Of course, my “favorite” sound came from the phone, the pager app. I really didn’t want to get up, so I did the lazy thing: checked which alarm fired through this terrible app we have to use, saw it wasn’t...
8 months ago • 4 min read
A couple weeks ago I wrote about making our reports take a couple seconds instead of 3 minutes. What I discovered later is that we didn’t actually have access to historical reports, because all the DynamoDB entries that pointed to the S3 data behind those reports had a TTL of one day. After asking around, the reason was simple: some partition keys were exceeding 10GB, and that’s the DynamoDB item collection limit per partition key (aka “all items with the same partition key”). So the...
8 months ago • 3 min read
My friend asked me yesterday if I know what AWS is. And it’s not someone I only talk to once in a while. We literally talk every day. I guess I always refer to my employer as just Amazon, so “AWS” never comes up. He recently acquired an app and needed to create a new AWS account, add a new user for his developer, and give him permissions for Lightsail (whatever that is). He managed to do the first two. The permissions part? Yep, he had no idea. I’ve written about IAM before here. My goal...
8 months ago • 2 min read
