Recent content on Stark Raving Finkle
In my last post using Kent Beck’s 3X Framework, I argued that agentic engineering is being perceived at different phases of maturity depending on where you sit. Executives believe the systems are mature, in Extract. Practitioners are doing the work of Expand. The practice, the tools, the workflows are still churning in Explore. Underneath that churn, there are four foundations we know…
Agentic engineering is happening at a breakneck pace, and many are wondering if they are making the “right” decisions and using the “right” approaches. I’ve been a proponent of not chasing the newest fad, but to instead learn about what’s being used across the industry and keeping your options open. I was listening to a recent Pragmatic Engineer podcast , where…
We’ve been building a more agentic engineering organization at League over the last ten months. I’ve been writing blog posts about different aspects along the way. In April, I felt like we’d crossed a threshold. A significant part of the engineering organization was not only using coding agents in daily workflows, the teams themselves had redesigned their operating models. Not…
Most teams measure AI impact on software delivery the same way: before and after comparisons on tasks that were already in the plan. A migration that used to take three weeks now takes two days. A bug that took a week to diagnose gets resolved in an afternoon. These are real wins. But they’re measuring the floor, not the ceiling. Speed on planned work is a productivity gain. The ability to…
There’s a growing belief in engineering circles that because coding agents can generate code so cheaply and quickly, we no longer need to invest in platform frameworks, services, and shared systems. The argument goes something like: code is essentially free now, so why bother with reusable building blocks? Just let agents generate what you need on the fly. I think this perspective…
League (my day job) recently enabled mandatory GitHub Copilot code reviews on all pull requests. Not that long ago, I would not have supported this idea. Models, and the agent systems that use the models, have improved to the point of frequently finding non-trivial issues with code in a pull request. We’d had Copilot and Codex reviews enabled for a while, but they were optional. Easy to…
For years, we’ve been told that software is eating the world. Big, cloud-hosted platforms — Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Jira, Airtable — working to solve every problem for every team, at any scale. And mostly, they delivered. SaaS transformed how businesses work. Making software and systems that support millions of people, with a variety of needs and requirements isn’t easy. Software…
I moved my 20+ year old WordPress blog off Bluehost and onto a modern static site setup with Hugo and Cloudflare Workers. What I expected to be a painful, multi-week project turned into a surprisingly smooth 4-day migration, largely thanks to working with Claude as a coding agent throughout the process. Why Move Away from WordPress? WordPress has served me well for two decades, but it felt like…
A few months ago, I wrote about vibe coding and the challenge of shipping quickly-created prototypes . I ended that post suggesting we could “teach” coding agents about our platform primitives through instruction files and MCP servers. At my day job (League), we’ve been putting this idea into practice, and the results have been very encouraging. Building a Knowledge Base for…
AI-assisted coding tools and agents have unlocked an unprecedented level of functional prototyping. Not just for developers. Product managers, Designers, even the C-suite are building functional prototypes of their ideas in a matter of days, or even hours. There can be a lot of value in creating a functional prototype of an idea so people can really test out the interactions and experience in ways…
I’ve been using Copilot in VS Code to help build several different projects. I’ve also used Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to help start and evolve projects. I find the tools to be very helpful and I feel more productive using them. I also find myself having more fun when using the tools. I have no doubt that these tools are here to stay and will become a standard part of software…
I had a lot of fun working through my “Exploring LLMs as Agent” series. I’m starting to dive a little deeper into some specific Agent use cases, so I’ll move away from “exploring” and start “building” agents. At work, we’ve started configuring rules outside of code, especially for situations where a non-developer wants to create some rule-based…
Up to this point, I have been experimenting with my own home-grown agent framework, based on Simon Willison’s great LLM project to handle wrapping the different LLMs. Armed with some experience, I want to start looking at real frameworks. Google released an Agent Development Kit at Google Next. It supports many of the features I have been playing with, including tool calling, planning, MCP,…
I finally got around to exploring local models, which is surprisingly simple to set up. I wanted to see how well a local model would perform in ToolAgent compared to the remote models (mostly Gemini) I have been using. For more context on my explorations , checkout the previous posts: Minimalist Approach , Taking Action , Planning via Prompting , Tools & Benchmarking , WebAgent Gets a Refactor ,…
I will likely run out of topics to cover in the “LLMs as Agents” series, eventually. I wanted to explore creating a chat UI and what I could do with embeddings but I didn’t do that. For more context , checkout the previous posts: Minimalist Approach , Taking Action , Planning via Prompting , Tools & Benchmarking , and WebAgent Gets a Refactor . Take a look at the repository to…
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My fifth post on LLMs as Agents. I just it’s a series now. After refactoring ToolAgent , I decided to do the same with WebAgent , building it on the ToolAgent system. For more context and a refresher on WebAgent , checkout the previous posts: Minimalist Approach : I kicked off my exploration by making two agents using the bare-minimum dependencies. I wanted to learn the concepts, before…
I spent some time refactoring the Tool Agent code, added some additional mock tools and even some basic benchmarking. For more context, checkout the previous posts: Minimalist Approach : I kicked off my exploration by making two agents using the bare-minimum dependencies. I wanted to learn the concepts, before using a do-it-all framework. Taking Action : I decided to focus on the tool_agent and…
My exploration of how to use LLMs as Agents continues. In this post, I’m looking at ways to improve the outcomes by using better approaches to planning. For more context, checkout the previous posts: Minimalist Approach : I kicked off my exploration by making two agents using the bare-minimum dependencies. I wanted to learn the concepts, before using a do-it-all framework. Taking Action : I…
I’m still exploring how to use LLMs to build agents. In the first post , I described some of the motivation and approach. I started working on two agents: web_agent : A basic agent that completes a web-based task using browser automation actions. tool_agent : A basic agent that completes a task using a set of supplied tools or methods. I’ve been focused more on tool_agent, trying to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for generating text, answering questions, and coding. We’ve moved beyond generating content, and LLMs are now being used to take actions as agents — independent entities that can act, use tools, and interact with their environment. You probably already know all of this. I wanted to explore using LLMs as agents, but I like to get an…
With engineering focus on reducing incidents and improving operational reliability, I frequently come back to the realization that humans are fallible and we should be learning ways to nudge people toward success rather than failure . There are whole industries and research machines built around the study of Human Factors, and how to improve safety, reliability, and quality. One topic that struck…
I’ve had cause to looked into research and ideas about the ways information flows within organizations. Discussions about transparency, decision making, empowering teams, and trust seem to intersect at organizational communication and information flows. One of my favorite people to follow in this space is Gene Kim ( Phoenix Project , DevOps Handbook , Accelerate , and DORA Reports ). He has…
I have been wanting to play around with an ESP32-based micro for a while. Once I became comfortable with Adafruit’s microcontrollers and CircuitPython , I thought I’d try out some of their ESP32 offerings. I bought a few Airlift (ESP32) Featherwings to use with the Feather RP2040 boards I was experimenting with. I’ve also been messing around with some WS2818 / NeoPixel LED 8×8…
Looking back at one of the first real projects I attempted which combined 3D printing and microprocessors. I received an Creality Ender 3 V2 a year ago and after playing around with some test prints, I wanted to try building some more interesting and complex projects. I came across this fiber optic LED lamp project via Instructables . It was just the right amount of 3D printing, microprocessors,…
I’ve been playing around with some WS2818 / NeoPixel LED 8x8 grids and CircuitPython . The CircuitPython ecosystem is really rich and Adafruit makes some very handy support libraries. I was using the LED Animation library to create some patterns on the neopixel grid, but wanted to try adding more capabilities. The time-slicing approach made it nice to add other code without blocking the…
“Developers should only need Github Issues and Pull Requests to do their job” — Why should anyone need more than that to track work? Small companies and startups have small engineering teams. The amount of effort required to understand the ongoing and planned work is low due to sheer lack of ability to take on too much and succeed. Failure weeds out the companies that take on too much,…
Practice makes perfect — Anonymous Parent A theme that keeps popping up in my world is the idea of how often an action is done being correlated to how well the action is done . Deploying application and system code Releasing application distributions Triaging issues Testing product behavior Creating objectives Running experiments Executing migrations A lot has been written about high-performing…
I often wonder if I’m being effective at my job. Might be related to my impostor syndrome, but in engineering management, the signals of effectiveness aren’t always clear. I have some basic, high level criteria I try to think about monthly, or so, to provide some insight. Providing a clear direction Lack of clear direction can sometimes be seen when teams are doing…
I had posted about the way Tumblr uses time-series monitoring to alert on crash spikes in the Android and iOS applications. Since then, we’ve done a lot of work to reduce the overall volume of crashes. As a result, we created a new problem: it was possible for a handful of people, caught in crash cycles, to cause our stability alerts to trigger. Once the stability alert is triggered, we…