Brandon Casci's Software Engineering and Entrepreneurship Blog
2026-07-29 The Afternoon I Was the Whole Team You’ve heard this, and so have I. AI is collapsing roles, one person now doing what used to take a product manager, a designer, and a few engineers. I’ve read the posts. I even wrote a couple. The job titles are already bending to it. This year, LinkedIn replaced its associate product manager program with an associate product builder track,…
2026-07-10 A Learning Loop That Makes My Agent Wiser Over Time My coding agent kept solving the same problems twice. One session it would work out that a native confirm() dialog can’t be visually QA’d, so a test that leans on one proves nothing. Two days later, fresh context, it would write that exact test again. The same thing happened with the phone number that has to match when…
2026-06-18 I Run a Company by Writing It Down Yes, AI can write code. But running a product is not all about writing code. In a week, a food pantry running my software might ask for a person’s age next to their birthdate so the front desk stops doing the math, a warning before they enter someone twice, and a couple of small bug fixes. Each one has to be understood, decided on, built, checked…
2026-06-12 Two UI Migrations and 56 Million Tokens Later, Claude Fable Still Needed My Eyes This week I aimed Claude at migrating the UI frameworks of two production apps. Every screen moved to a new framework, and nothing about how either app behaves changed. The migrations ran side by side and finished over two days. Two days is calendar time, not a stopwatch. I started with brainstorming…
2026-06-02 Stop Correcting Your AI. Grade It, Tune It, and Compound the ROI. I arrived here by giving the AI more autonomy. The more it runs on its own, the faster a slightly-off instruction turns into wasted work. Your code-review-improve loops run longer than they should. You burn time curating skills, subagent prompts, rules files, and CLAUDE.md content, tweaking by gut feel and hoping the next…
2026-05-07 Your Hiring Process Is a Mirror I was approached for a senior Rails role through a staffing agency. The evaluation was three stages: a take-home coding test, a live coding test, and a shop talk. I’ve been building software for 30 years. I declined and told the recruiter exactly why. Two Negative Signals I understand agencies need margin, and I was willing to flex on comp to…
2026-04-07 The Gravity Between You and the 100X Dark Factory I heard Nathan B Jones talking about the concept of a living resume and how he thought the current hiring model was toast. The idea stuck with me. I expanded it into a product called Profyle : a professional profile platform with three layers of depth. A scannable surface view, expandable stories behind each role, and an AI conversation…
2026-02-24 How I Came to Understand the 100x Claim First people bragged about 3-5x productivity gains from AI, then 10x, and now 100x. Usually without much clarity beyond references to parallelism and orchestration. I’d read these claims and think, OK, but what does that actually look like? What are you doing differently that gets you there? I was skeptical for a while. Then I lived through…
2025-12-24 Composable Rules: How Small Teams Match Big Company Output Without the Bloat Small teams and solo developers compete with funded companies every day. Traditionally, small teams defended niches by being nimble. Now they can simulate the parts of bigger institutions that work without the overhead. Big companies have resources: Multiple developers QA teams DevOps Established processes They…
2025-10-23 Building a Production App with AI: The Boswell Story You see a lot of “AI-First” success stories floating around. Weekend builds that turn into six-figure SaaS products. Solo developers shipping faster than funded teams. Instant revenue from AI-generated apps. This isn’t that story. This is a breakdown of what AI-first product development actually looked like for me,…
2025-09-25 My AI Organization Ships Like We’re Funded, But It’s Just Me (Part 1) Part 1: The Knowledge Infrastructure I ship at the velocity of a funded startup, but it’s just me. The difference is giving AI assistants the same domain knowledge a human team member would have. I’m not working harder or using productivity hacks. I’m helping AI move from a coding intern…
2025-09-23 How I Went From Dev Team to Engineering VP with Claude Code I had a bug that only appeared during parallel processing. It was intermittent, timing-dependent, and the kind that makes you question your life choices. My issue-diagnosis agent found worthwhile improvements that would stave off issues like this, but couldn’t nail the root cause. After a few attempts I took a crack at…
2025-09-21 How One Person Becomes a Dev Team with Claude Code I wanted to augment my productivity. GitHub Copilot worked for single lines. Then Claude Code and Cursor promised a “pair programmer”, but out of the box they delivered an eager helper with a paintbrush in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other. I got Jackson Pollock and Gallagher rolled into one. I tried add-on…
2025-08-24 How We Automated GitHub Issues with Free AI Building on the foundation: This artist is an extention to teaching Claude Code to be consistent and turning prompts into reusable commands . If you’re new to CLAUDE.md files, start there. We’re a small team that runs everything through GitHub Issues. I’d already invested in Claude Code Pro and documented our patterns with…
2025-08-04 Turn Your Best AI Prompts into Reusable Commands You’ve documented your patterns with CLAUDE.md files . Claude checks them automatically. Your code is consistent now. But you’re still typing the same TDD instructions every time you implement something. What if that perfect prompt could be a simple command? What if we could express our intentions for work this way? /implement…
2025-07-30 From Chaos to Control: How I Taught Claude Code to be Consistent and Accurate I started using Claude Code for Rails development with the same excitement everyone has when they first discover AI coding assistants. The promise was incredible: describe what you want, get working code instantly. Then reality hit. Suboptimal code. Inconsistent patterns. Going off on tangents when I asked for…
2025-02-14 Vibe Coding Needs a Reality Check: Why AI-Generated Code Still Requires Engineering Discipline The term “vibe coding” has been making the rounds, painting a picture of a laid-back, intuitive way to write software with AI. The idea? You describe what you want, accept the AI-generated code, and move on. No stress, no deep dives, just code that vibes. Except… the way…
2025-02-13 UI Unblocker: A CustomGPT for Breaking Through UI Design Roadblocks Sometimes, a UI just doesn’t feel right. You tweak layouts, adjust spacing, change colors, but something is still off. That’s when I started using AI as a UX auditor—not to replace design tools, but to help me break through creative blocks. I put together UI Unblocker , a CustomGPT designed for one-off UI…
2025-02-09 Refactoring GraphQL with AI Coding Assistants: A Real-World Use Case AI coding assistants are everywhere, but much of the content focuses on simplistic, contrived demos. “Hey AI, make me a to-do list app!” Of course, greenfield projects work like magic. The real test is applying AI to large, messy, real-world codebases that have evolved over time. That’s what I did…
2025-01-09 Getting AI Coding Assistants From OK To Great I’ve been experimenting with AI coding tools to see if I could improve their effectiveness. My focus has been on training Cursor AI for a specific project I’m working on at RiseKit. Here’s what I done so far: ✅ Rules and Templates I created a rules file with project-specific coding standards, architecture patterns, testing…
2023-09-30 Process Spawning with Ruby In 2015, I needed a way to record audio streams on a scheduled basis. To accomplish this I created a Rails app called Radioshifter that served as a UI for editing and storing schedules. Under the hood, Radioshifter did a lot of things. One of those things was spawning new processes whenever it was time to capture an audio stream. Radioshifter - R.I.P. Methods…
2023-08-28 Inter-Process Communication With Ruby 🔄 In 2015, I needed a way to record audio streams on a scheduled basis. To accomplish this, I created a Rails app called Radioshifter that served as a UI for editing and storing schedules. In a separate process, a rufus-scheduler would run and start/stop various command line applications that captured online audio streams to disk and…
2023-08-24 Building a Hot Tub from Scratch 🛀 I went to Iceland a while back, which was fantastic. During my time there, I enjoyed a daily soak in a hot tub. After a few days of soaking I noticed a lot of nagging aches and pains were gone. So I thought, damn, I need to get one of these for my house some day. I would shop around, but never pull the trigger. Finally, in 2019, I made the…
2023-08-21 Internationalization with Ruby on Rails with I18n Internationalization is the process of designing and developing web applications that can support multiple languages and locales. This is an important consideration for any web application that needs to reach a global audience, as it allows users to interact with the application in their preferred language and format. Ruby on Rails…