One of the biggest problems I encountered while building my AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping assistant was getting it to reliably follow all the procedures. I had all the skills broken down into bite-size pieces and structure laid out in a sensible way, but the agent would often improvise. When I pressed the agent [ ]
Over the past month, I ve been building a WordPress site as a data-brain layer connected to Claude in a NanoClaw container. My goal is a plugin with a group of skills and endpoints that can: Since starting the project, I ve dramatically evolved my thoughts on the future of the UX of AI interfaces its practical [ ]
I ve been a jack of all trades web developer for nearly 15 years and moved to working full-time in hiring in September 2020. At Automattic, we re hiring as fast as we can. This has given me a chance to work with and evaluate hundreds of software engineers over the past eight months. The Day-to-Day: A [ ]
Since joining the hiring team at Automattic in the fall of 2019, I ve noticed different patterns and preferences on text-based interviews. Some of these are also general interviewing tips. Send shorter messages The pacing of the conversation is improved when you send multiple shorter messages instead of one multi-paragraph message. Answer as you go along. [ ]
I just finished reading Code Simplicity, and, as someone who has a tendency for perfectionism, one thing that stood out to me was the idea of not worrying about building something perfect. It s OK to not aim for perfection on version one. Or any version. You don t even know what perfection looks like at when [ ]
Gaining expertise is difficult enough, but how can you tell if yourself (or someone else) has reached expert status? Unfortunately, multiple-choice tests are ineffective predictors since the benefit of expertise is being able to conjure up complex, situational-dependent solutions where there is no correct answer. One of the simpler ideas is to see how long [ ]
As a joke (with some seriousness), I bought a glass-like impossible puzzle. It’s made of clear acrylic, has eight corners for extra trickiness, and it’s impossible to see which side is “up.” My wife is much better at puzzles than I am, and I thought this might be finally be her match. After an hour [ ]
For months, our bedroom light would not turn on. Well, at times it would, randomly illuminating the room whenever it seemed fit. And at others, turn off without warning. As far as we could tell, there were no signs of ghosts. We were having our attic turned into livable space and the contractors had recently [ ]
Since joining the hiring team at Automattic, I ve been using the recruiting/hiring software Greenhouse to score Code Tests and evaluate trial candidates. There are some things that have annoyed me a little about the site, so I wrote a few user scripts to improve my own time on Greenhouse. A user script is JavaScript that [ ]
I knew I needed to build some kind of survey to see if dropping the time limit from the code test would have any measurable impact on time spent or pressure. But I wasn t sure if it should be anonymous or not. On one hand, I assumed the data for an anonymous survey would be [ ]