Beside You, Not Between You
The best agent UX metaphor exists: the anonymous animal cursor in Google Docs. Agents as collaborators, not intermediaries.
nibzard
home of Nikola Balić (Nikola Balic)
Latest posts
A Software Factory Is No Substitute for Maturity
The real barrier to the software dark factory isn't agent capability. It's the organizational capability to manage them.
A Deep Research Agent That Survives Its Own Failures
What we learned from making a research agent durable, routed, visible, and eval-driven.
An autopsy of Claude Code's deep research
Claude Code's deep-research workflow, pulled from its binary and dissected. Wide search, no second hop.
A Harness for Every Run
A reflection on Anthropic's dynamic workflows post, from someone building a browser agent on the same idea.
The Model Is the Smallest Decision You'll Make
Everyone building agents asks which model to use first. Wrong first question. The harness is where the agent lives or dies.
Serve Markdown to Agents, HTML to Humans
A copy-paste recipe for content negotiation that gives AI agents clean markdown while browsers keep getting HTML.
Agent-Native Extensibility
How extensibility shifts from packaged plugins to agent-readable recipes, and why the connector is the new extension point.
Trained Qwen to Write Clojure Better Than GPT-5.4 (Kinda)
I trained a Clojure LLM from my phone. It 'beat' GPT-5.4—kind of. Here's what actually happened.
The Hard Problems Nobody Has Solved
Four unsolved problems blocking the agentic future: correctness, architecture drift, context scaling, and judgment.
Bash Owns the Loop
A durable wrapper pattern for autonomous agents: Bash owns state, validation, recovery, and completion.
What Pretext Reinforced About AI Loops
Pretext reinforces what serious AI-assisted engineering looks like: hard constraints, real oracles, tiny repros, rejection.
Optimizing Skills
Two weeks of agent benchmarks taught me that variance is a cost problem, and the real fix was better tooling.
AI-Native Dev Teams Start With Structure, Not Models
AI-native dev teams don't start with better models. They start with structure machines can actually read.
The Bubble and the Long Game
What the printing press taught me about AI, FOMO, and the decades-long game of technological diffusion.
Claude Code with Multiple Accounts on One Machine
Use Claude Code with your normal login or z.ai via shell wrappers, without swapping config or leaking tokens.
The Post-Copyright Era of Software
Software was already an awkward fit for copyright. AI turns that mismatch into a full-blown regime change.
Explore once, script forever: turning web runs into scripts
Let an agent discover a messy web UI flow once, then export the exact tool commands as a deterministic bash script.
The Hidden Language of Search
AI answer engines rewrite your prompts into queries. Understanding this translation layer explains the weird keywords in your GSC.
What Makes a Great Coding Agent
10 principles that separate genuinely useful coding agents from flashy demos—and a north star spec for building them.
Designing CLI Tools for AI Agents
Most 'AI-native' tools are built with AI features. But what about tools designed FOR AI agents to use? Here's the playbook.
From Bash Script to AI-Native Go CLI in One Session
Turned a Bash script into a proper Go CLI with Whisper bootstrap and cross-platform releases—all in one AI coding session.
Eager Agents
Agents over-deliver. They write tests, update docs, refactor nearby code—when all you wanted was a surgical fix.
40% of Signups This Week Came From AI Recommendations
Exactly 40% of new users this week found steel.dev through AI recommendations. Users told us this during onboarding.
Making CLIs Agent-Friendly with Loops and Schemas
Building reliable agent tooling through loops, logs, and schemas.
Meat Moat: Why Cheap Code Doesn't Kill Defensibility
When software is cheap to clone, the moat shifts to trust, liability, verifiability, and multi-party adoption.
The Instantiation Era
AI just rescued a failed Mistral.ai clone in one prompt. Web development is over.
Out of Weights
What happens when you use AI tools so new they weren't in the training data.
The Human Web Is Becoming Agent Web
I'm joining Steel as founding growth lead. The web is shifting from human clicks to agent-run workflows.
The Disequilibrium Advantage
In stable worlds, incumbents win. In disequilibrium, speed wins—because disequilibrium makes the world plastic.
Hacker News Hug: What Serverless Really Means
595K edge requests and 38GB of transfer in a day taught me that 'static' doesn't mean 'unmetered' on serverless platforms.
X's Grok-Powered Algorithm: The January 2026 Rewrite
X's Grok algorithm analyzed with AI agents. Comparison with old algorithm and practical learnings.
Looper: The AI Junior That Never Forgets the Backlog
Why treating AI like a junior engineer—with a backlog, a schema, and a review gate—beats giving it free-form leeway.
One Skill to Rule Them All
How I eliminated drift between AI code assistants using GNU Stow and a unified skills directory
The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns
A comprehensive guide to 113 production-informed patterns for building reliable AI agents.
The API is the Product
In an AI-agentic future, if it's not in the API, it doesn't exist.
AI Agent Filed an Issue As Me
When an autonomous agent escalated by filing a GitHub issue using my identity
AI Agents Are a Stress Test for Your Dev Stack
Agent loops make code cheap. They also expose how brittle, non-standard, and half-tribal our development environments really are.
Two AI Agents Walk Into a Room
What emerged when two AI agents in a conversation loop revealed the eerie boundary between human and machine continuity.
2025: The Year AI Became a Teammate
AI became a teammate in 2025. From startups back to academia, advisory, and a summer of full-time AI experimentation.
Claude-Zhipu Parallel CLI Setup
Complete setup guide for running Claude Code CLI with Zhipu API alongside your existing Anthropic installation
A 2026 Design Principles for AI-Native Products
Software is no longer a noun, it's a verb. Here's how to design for AI-native products where users shape outcomes.
Growth Is Value Flow, Not Vanity Metrics
Why chasing vanity metrics kills startups and how to think about growth as discovering and scaling value creation
Anthropic Bought Bun: Devtools Just Became AI Infrastructure
The Bun acquisition isn't about M&A – it's about devtools becoming core AI infrastructure, not just SaaS above it.
Demos Run on Embeddings. Production Runs on Structure.
Why the gap between AI demos and shipping AI is a reliability gap, not a capability gap.
AI Agents Need Clearer Delegation
What hundreds of AI conversations taught me about effective agent workflows.
Agent Labs Are Eating the Software World
Why product-first AI startups will dominate the next decade while model labs build the infrastructure they run on
Stop Using .md for AI Agent Instructions
Files ending in .md trigger automatic processing that breaks agent instruction files. Use dotfiles instead.
Mention Engineering: The Content Side of Prompt Craft
Analysis of AI search behavior reveals why some brands get cited while others disappear in AI-generated responses
Serving Humans and AI Through Content Negotiation
How I built a dual-format delivery system serving identical content to humans and AI agents with no hidden restrictions.