A blog by tclem
It’s been over a year since I published Creative Flow vs. Critical Review, as much of my writing on AI has been internal. I’m hoping to publish a bit more here and wanted to start by sharing a little bit of my agent setup (as of May 2026). A version of this was originally published on an internal discussion board titled “Agents of productivity and chaos - multi-repo, multi-agent learnings and…
Models of reality vs. models of what people say about reality.
This was originally an internal discussions post, surfacing on my blog because it is interesting to see how far we’ve come since October 2025 and how much my thinking has changed. For context, Claude Opus 4.5 was released November 24, 2025. Part 1 of 2.
Something I struggle with when writing code in the current state of AI is the quick oscillation between creative flow and critical review that many AI tools force upon their humans. Here’s what happens…
One problem I’ve run into a number of times over the years in working on parsers and information retrieval systems is the need to identify positions in a document by multiple units. These positions are used, for example, to identify the location of a cursor, to highlight a matching term, to denote an identifier for lookup, or to do syntax highlighting. On a backend system, it is desirable to store…
I’ve been slowly working on some basic home automation, tackling minor home projects that involve manual and repetitive steps. One of my core values is that any automation I add to the house must still have a low-fidelity fallback. Obviously operating a light requires power, but you should still be able to turn your lights on/off if the home network is down and in general there’s only a small…
Much has been written about encodings—and specifically unicode—by programmers and for programmers, but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and easier still to feel enlightened until the next text encoding bug bites. Recently, I’ve been exploring how text and strings are represented in different programming languages and I think the various language specific implementations are actually a critical…
In the programming language design space there are so many interesting facets of language design and subsequent arguments about the various merits thereof that it can often bring about a paralysis of choice when deciding what to use or what to standardize on. Or, instead of paralysis, you’ll get entrenchment and an inability to form consensus: people love their language of choice and will argue…
Bangkok, Chiang Mai, & Krabi Thailand. Taipei, Taiwan.