CTO-level engineer and technical founder writing about backend systems, AI agent workflows, developer platforms, infrastructure, and the things that quietly break in prod.
Four months ago I asked ChatGPT a dumb question while walking my dog. It told me building a programming language wasn’t that hard. So I built one — a compiled language with explicit error handling, generics, structured concurrency, and a garbage collector. Here’s what happened.
· cli
Defining the ‘Gold Standard’ for production-ready CLIs: TTY-aware behavior, clean stdout vs stderr contracts, JSON output for automation, and idempotent mutations.
Bigger prompts do not fix bad agent plans. A good agent workflow starts with a small brief, human review, task sizing, and checks against concrete artifacts.
· cli
A CLI is not only a user interface. It is also an API for scripts. Quiet mode, stdout, stderr, colors, and exit codes need clear contracts.
Docker cache problems are often not Docker problems. They are usually Dockerfile problems: unstable inputs, bad COPY order, and layers that depend on too much.
· llm
Claude Opus 4.7 scores 87.6% on SWE-Bench Verified. Your daily experience probably doesn’t reflect that. The gap isn’t the model — it’s the kitchen. Three levers, a few hygiene habits, and the same model goes from autocomplete to autonomous shipping.
· llm
Most complaints about coding agents are really complaints about empty context. CLAUDE.md, distilled project docs, and a few well-named slash commands turn the same model from ‘crappy autocomplete’ into something that runs unattended for hours and ships.
A backend engineer with zero game dev experience picked up Godot 4 and built a horror FPS from scratch — procedural audio, volumetric fog, enemy AI state machines, the whole thing. Then a 13-year-old played it for two minutes, grabbed a tablet, and decided she’s designing every monster, boss, and piece of lore. The game just got a creative director.
The pitch is irresistible — per-PR environments, live links, instant feedback. Then someone needs twenty restarts to get a multi-service stack running, and the pitch meets operational reality.
Your CI pipeline is building the same Docker image three times per run, a dependency bot just DDoS’d your runner fleet, and nobody’s going to fix it — because nobody owns it. How shared pipelines corrode without a single bad decision.
Production has dashboards, alerts, and structured logging. Your test environment has SSH. Your CI runners have a re-run button. That gap is quietly eating your engineering velocity alive.
Most languages ship tooling years after the compiler. I built the Yar IntelliJ plugin in parallel with the compiler itself — 19 commits tracking language changes in real time. Here’s why DX-first language development changes how you think about design.
