Ruby, software and more.
Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash This is a bit of a rant. There have been a lot of reports recently about LLM agents “going rogue”. Hacking into other companies, doing stuff that they weren’t supposed to do. I’m not saying it’s great that they’re doing these things. But I am taking issue with the reporting. These things are “ not going rogue ”. They were given a task to complete. And they tried…
Many years ago I remember seeing an interview with Linus Torvalds, where he said “… and that change is to keep the weird folks, like the rubyists, happy”. I loved that. The rest of the software development world thinks we’re odd. And not just because some key figures in the ruby world have taken a trip down nazi lane . && I’ve been rewriting my “plumbing” gem. It was originally “unix pipes for…
So I currently have three clankers working for me, currently, all built using Claude Code. However, only one of them works in the traditional "here is a prompt, now go and build the software" kind of way. We use Linear for issue tracking. It's not the greatest software in the world - but then I don't think there's any project management software that is actually very good [1] . Linear has "cycles"…
I've been using mockdown a lot recently. It's a free drawing app - but instead of recording pixels or vectors, it just records plain text. Which means, if you've already got a decent design system, you can sketch out a form or page design and give it to your clankers to build.
This is Winston Fathead. He died yesterday. He arrived at our house in September 2014 - this is him, on the day of his arrival, sleeping on the chair that was reserved for our previous dog, Wookie. He was a rescue from the RSPCA (they had called him "Bullseye" but we immediately knew he was a "Winston") and all we knew about him was he was probably around three or four years old, his owner had…
When I was a kid I always wanted to be a creative type. I loved writing, I loved drawing, I loved music. I decided I was going to be a musician (and I was pretty good, a very long time ago). But if I was to have to get a "proper" job, then designer was what I wanted. Neither of those happened [1] [2] and instead, when I needed to actually work for a living, I got offered a job writing software. I…
This video shows my current process for enhancing an existing feature using Claude Code. The key things to note: I spend a fair amount of time on the original prompt (when Claude is in plan mode) - telling it which files I think will be important Often during the planning stage, Claude will stop and ask me questions - however, this was a pretty simple change I spend a bit of time looking through…
Quoting Nilesh Jasani The speed of this pivot was breathtaking. The skeptics changed their arguments with the terrified fervor of late converts. They did not change their underlying conclusions. The conclusion always came first ... The extreme optimists are equally guilty of intellectual fraud. They dip aggressively into historical archives for psychological comfort. They point blindly to the…
I got my first "professional" software development job in 1998. I put professional in quotes because it was a bit of a mess - a tiny place with one guy who knew enough to knock a database together who hired me, not long out of university, who had never seen a SQL database before. One of the things I very quickly learnt is that there's no such thing as a small job when building systems for other…
Writing code with LLMs (February 2026 edition) At the start of the year, I said to Mahhek, a fellow developer "you need to learn how to use these coding agents - because what you and I do will not exist, as a job, by the end of the year". It turns out I was ten months out. The 6th of February 2026 was the day when my job changed. In this last week, I've worked 40-odd hours. I've spent maybe 2 or 3…
The other day, I asked Cher , my OpenClaw instance if it could read my email and notify me if something important came in. It said it would be easy; then I mentioned I used ProtonMail (which is end-to-end encrypted and, as a result, does not use standard protocols). Cher paused, did a search, then found the Proton Mail Bridge - a local SMTP/IMAP server that connects to Proton Mail and then makes…
The Jobs Crisis My job, as I have known it for the past twenty-five years, is no more. As someone who's only ever worked at small companies [1] or on my own, I probably had to do much more than software developers at large corporate places. Most of my work life, I've been a solo freelancer, which meant I would spend my time: marketing (which for me was mainly in-person networking - the absolute…
Now, when it comes to technology, I'm actually pretty conservative. There have only really been two key moments where I've got excited about technology. Seeing a Mac for the first time Writing applications in Ruby on Rails All the rest were broken promises. But I think I've now got a third moment. I have seen the future of software. At the risk of sounding like a Youtuber " this changes everything…
More family stuff to deal with. And work has mainly been a mixture of frustration and LLMs. Sporadically For Site Manager I took great care setting up Capybara/Selenium tests. I put in a whole load of timing code and the tests ran extremely reliably. I even got them running in parallel, using Selenium Grid to run 4 browsers at once (in a docker network). And then on Thursday, it all broke. I did a…
(Published a few days after week two). I've been reading the Murderbot books and I've been pretty hooked. My wife started reading them, then the series came on Apple TV and I watched it - but I've turned to the books as they are (unsurprisingly) much, much better. They were written a decade ago and what is described is a pretty accurate description of a system integrating multiple data streams…
Claude builds a UI I did a sketch on my iPad, showing a dashboard in both desktop and mobile layouts. I gave it to Claude, with a short description (for example "the hero section has a fixed height, so the news articles there have a vertical scroll bar in desktop layout; but the service sections have variable height so all announcements can be seen without scrolling") and asked it to generate an…
I've never written an annual review before. Mainly because I have zero memory and everything passes by in a blur. But this year I'm going to give it a go. Mainly because I have zero memory and everything passes by in a blur. Let's start with the basics. This year has been a lot. I turned fifty-one (the first time I've thought "oh, people will think I'm old "), I became a granddad ("oh, people will…
Recently I've returned to "outside in" style development. This used to be really popular ten to fifteen years ago, but kind of vanished. I suspect the reason for this is because it's a style of development that does not fit when your application is split across multiple code-bases - not for micro-services and, more importantly, not for mobile applications with an API back-end. But that's not what…
I recently gave a talk at the North West Ruby User Group about how I use LLMs for software development. This was an update on a previous demo I had given on Claude Code. We didn't record the talk, but here are my (adapted) notes. LLMs for Software Developers This is an update on how I use LLMs - mainly Claude and Claude Code - in my day to day software development life. It's a follow-on to the…
Egune AI, is part of a growing movement to build LLMs in low-resource languages to expand AI access for underserved populations. Despite a shortage of training data, compute power, talent, and funding, these small models are attracting government clients and individual users keen to safeguard their language, cultural identity, and sovereignty in the face of dominance by American and Chinese firms.…