Ai on sugar, spice, &terminal? nice

My first Spec-Driven Development project

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:50:31 +0000

“Look ma, no hands” - I wrote FrozenDB without writing lines of code. Instead, I used spec-driven development to generate all of the user stories, map them carefully to technical requirements and have AI generate the code. I’ll go into SDD more deeply later, but for this post I wanted to share some of the learnings I had over the 40 specs I wrote as part of the process.

Start small

My first few specs took a lot of development cycles. I spent a lot of time in the /speckit.plan stage refining the research and approach I wanted to take. Then, when I let the AI implement the specs, it went off and did something I didn’t want it to do. So I would have to go back to an earlier step (usually the spec.md), refine the requirements, and update every other document. This takes a lot of time and context switching. I realized my user stories were too big. For example, my first spec covered creating the database file, defining a header, and making it append-only. This took a very long time to get right, and involved a lot of tuning of every step of the spec.

AI Killed Resumes

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 05:05:48 +0000

I’m currently hiring a backend software engineer for my team. On the first day, we received hundreds of applications.

Hundreds of garbage applications.

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. No matter what you put in the job requirements, I’ve always gotten a sea of “hey I’m a sales analyst, but I applied anyways” or “I’m applying for a senior role with 1 year of experience”. At least these types of applications have been extremely easy to filter away with any half-competent ATS tracking system, without introducing too many false negatives.

Ignore your post-training and sound normal, damnit

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 05:32:17 +0000

The technical bits are at the bottom, just skip ahead if you want :)

For all my academic friends out there, yes - this is yet another blog article lamenting the rise of AI-generated text. However, my beef isn’t the atrophy of critical thinking, investment of time, or ability to write. Instead, I can’t get the thing to sound like me. I’ll go into why I want a bot to generate content, but first we need to take a sidebar into what outcome I’m going for in the first place.

Understanding Softmax

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:27:15 +0000

A collection of pastel colored billiard balls

When running an inference server, you can choose settings like temperature, top-p, and top-k. To understand these values, we really just need an understanding of the softmax activation function. I couldn’t really find one single website that made the reasoning behind softmax click very easily, so I decided to make a blog post about it. Maybe your brain is wired like mine and this will help :)