How I Ran My Job Search Like an Engineering Project
Don’t Panic…
Peter van Onselen: Staff Engineering & AI
A staff engineer figuring out AI-assisted development in public.
Latest posts
Money for Nothing
When feedback arrives late, noisy, or wearing the wrong sign.
The Machine Had Been Keeping a Diary
Burn the land and boil the sea; the skills, I hope, come with me.
Encode It, Don’t Remember It
Panic! at the SWC Compiler: cannot add pure comment to zero position.
The more an AI can break, the less you let it do.
Notes from a production incident.
Doesn’t Look Like Anything to Me
What happens when you point five 3D generation models at the same concept image.
I Didn’t Grok Superpowers
You Can’t Just Install Someone Else’s Workflow and Level Up.
The Best Part Has No AI in It
On building the plumbing between the prompts.
An Army of One Prompt
On discovering that good process survives the jump from code to plastic.
Show Your Work
On discovering that “show your work” is not the same thing as “do the work well.”
Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied
That they forgot to ask whether SSHing into an AI coding agent from a phone was a good idea.
I Built This In A Prompt Window! With A Box Of Filament!
I Vibe Coded A Model Into My House
Conscious Coverage
We don’t talk about Code coverage, no no no, we don’t talk about coverage…
The Canary in the Harness
On discovering that your favourite tool got measurably worse, that you’d been blaming yourself for it, and that the only reason you noticed at all was because another harness was sitting right next to it behaving normally.
The Grand Plugin Trap
A modest meditation on plugins, portability, and the peculiar sorrow of a workflow that cannot leave the building.
The Council Will See You Now…
You were the chosen one! You were supposed to destroy the hallucinations, not join them!
The Smell of Panic When You Context Thrash
High high hope for the code, shooting for a PR when I couldn’t even make a commit…
The Feedback That Doesn’t Care About Your Title
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger … right?
How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Agentic Katas
I don’t know how to teach this. But I think I’ve figured out how to practice it…
14 PRs, 6 Repos, 1 Button: A Tale of Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole
True stories from the front lines of the internet…