hank.bond

The best pattern is the one you can understand

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Models are loosely a compression of all the easily accessible human knowledge (obviously this depends on their training corpus and parameter size etc.), so they have pretty much every software pattern stuffed in them. If you were to ask a colleague “what pattern should I apply to this problem?” they can only point you towards the patterns they are aware of. That colleague will hopefully also be able to communicate their motivation for choosing that pattern, either as a practical choice (it scales well) or a matter of taste (it makes sense). Now, you may disagree that their proposal makes sense. After all, everyone has their own unique perspective that is informed by their skill level, domain of expertise, and aesthetic alignment.

When You Leave, What Comes with You?

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:18:59 +0000

This one is a bit of a ramble but I have some loose questions bouncing around rn.

Who owns the Agentic capabilities you create for yourself in the course of working somewhere? When you learn something during your day job, it’s tacitly agreed upon that the knowledge in your meat machine is yours to keep. It’s not like the company has direct access to it anyway, they have to use You as an Interface to get access to it anyway. They own the code you create, but not the knowledge of how to re-create that code (outside of some strict trade-secret agreements I guess).

Your Coding Agent Should Maximize 'Youness'

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:59:51 +0000

Creative vs Assertive

This is not really a hot take, but I was just thinking about how in The Before Times we already had different developer setups when we did work. I’m pretty basic and just raw dog VS Code without any meaningful extensions. Plenty of coworkers have used JetBrains flavors, Vim, EMacs, some even use Sublime Text because they like the simplicity.

The human aspect of the code creation was also very different person to person. Each team member had their own affinity for certain design patterns, and as long as it was understandable to the others pretty much anything goes. Names of Things are also relatively arbitrary, so variance there was to be expected as well.

On Working with LLMs on Unfamiliar Territory

Tue, 26 May 2026 01:14:42 +0000

Unlike when I am prototyping a solution using tools, concepts, and frameworks that I already understand, when I am trying to work in an area where I cannot be a reliable judge, I tend to iterate much more carefully. There’s really two frames that I am under when working with Models and they are mostly mutually exclusive. I try to increase either speed of:

Output artifact creation by leveraging my expertise and ability to Judge faster than I can Do.
Input knowledge acquisition by leveraging the Model’s ability to Explain faster than I can Do.

So in the second frame, the primary goal is that I bring myself up to speed until I feel comfortable defending the directions we have taken. Yes sometimes its just “well that’s the best I can understand this for now”, but when the session is over I am one step closer to reaching the first frame.

AI Layoffs are Tacit Admissions of Failure

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The last year has been pretty wild for the software industy. As of April 2026, this year has had 33k job cuts (if you ask Challenger, Gray & Christmas, who supposedly have been providing layoff stats for quite a long time [@challenger-apr-2026].) The common theme from the CEOs here is that AI is the main motivator (or enabler) of these layoffs.

If we take them at their word they are either

We Have the Model, Why do We Need You?

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was thinking about how to properly communicate the value of

Software Engineering as a discipline, in the era of rapid LLM code generation
Me as an individual, basically “why should you hire me specifically?”

In The Before Times, the answer was vaguely “I solve your business problem using code”.

This value was pretty clear to Business People, in that they would want a thing to do a thing and had two options.

Semantic HTML Explorations

Thu, 14 May 2026 20:42:10 +0000

Was talking with Chat about whether or not we were maximally using HTML tags that are more semantic in nature in this site’s templates and processing. Given that this is currently a Hugo based site, and its pretty easy to improve HTML usage with automation, I thought it would good to explore this.

Here are some cool (by my estimation) HTML tags that I was not aware of before.

abbr is for acronyms and abbreviations. I find this valuable because while I love to use acronyms for the improved information density, I really don’t like assuming that everyone reading will be aware of what they mean. As a reader/learner I find these types of assumptions very freustrating, especially when they are for terms and abbreviations specific to an industry. Using this tag lets me document what abberviations stand for pretty easily.

Reflection is All You Need

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To create great agents/skills: start very small and very simple with broad language telling it what you want (not how to do it), use it as-is, pay attention as it runs, add corrections for where it went wrong back into the prompt, repeat over and over and over. That’s it!

MCP vs CLI: The Token Tax

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For local agentic workflows, CLI tools composed with unix pipes are leaner on tokens, faster to iterate, and more expressive than MCP. MCP is most useful for enterprises with more robust operational needs. For one developer talking to their own machine, go with the simpler CLI approach.

Agents must have the same context as Humans