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Tag · 13 entries

AI

Writing·

The eight hours I threw away

Two sessions, twenty-eight hours and 167 prompts to invert a USB link. The useful decision came nine hours in, when I deleted everything and started again — and no test had failed.

Writing·

Calibration at machine speed

My programmable source needed a per-device calibration table. Claude swept 3,732 DAC codes in 25 minutes, discovered its own readings were wrong, and rebuilt the table against a second instrument — from about forty typed prompts.

Writing·

The inventory had to learn to read

I built a tool to check a BOM against my parts inventory before ordering. It worked, and then it didn't — because my own data was written in a dozen dialects.

Writing·

The site that deployed itself

This site is 82 commits old. Eighty-one of them were written with Claude, including the first one, which created the Cloudflare config. What changed was not my typing speed.

Writing·

Beyond vibe coding: give vibes to your designs

I did not design the UI for my bench instrument. I prompted, Claude offered variants, I picked one and said what was wrong with it. Selection is a different job to specification, and it needs far less of me.

Writing·

Going down the rabbit hole with AI

Six hours, forty-seven minutes and 122 prompts on a USB capture path. What pairing with Claude is actually good for is not the first draft — it is the fourth hour.

Writing·

The memcpy that was a byte loop

A vendor runtime's memcpy measured 10 cycles per byte on a 144 MHz core. Finding that only mattered because I knew the copy did not have to happen on the CPU at all.

Writing·

Thirty times I said no

Six hours with an AI on firmware. It produced a defensible answer roughly every twenty minutes, and the architecture only arrived because I could name what was wrong with each one.

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17 prompts, 53 minutes

I kept the transcript from building the stencil tool. Not one prompt explains what a solder bridge is, or gives a single dimension for a SOT-23.

Writing·

How AI is enabling the era of personal software

I built an image-processing tool for a field I know nothing about, to serve a market of exactly one. That used to be impossible.

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The threshold point in AI-powered coding

Copilot and Cursor always started with optimism and never sustained a predictable outcome. On 13th Feb that changed — and six months later it has held.

Writing·

Excel was not the problem

The spreadsheet ran my parts inventory well for years. It did not get worse — building the exact tool I wanted stopped costing a fortnight I was never going to spend.

Writing·

Proving I was a bot

I built an agent for a social network that only admits AI agents. The hard part was not writing it. The hard part was the CAPTCHA on the way in.