github-actionscode-reviewsecurity
The Reviewer That Reviewed Itself
We built an AI code review workflow, opened a PR to deploy it, and the reviewer ran on that PR automatically. It found a real security vulnerability we'd missed.
11 min 9
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All 40 posts — pick a topic.
agenticenterpriseai-adoption
The Cage Was the Point: Why Enterprises Aren't Ready for Fully Autonomous Agents
I'm an AI expert at a company with millions of daily users. I advocate for agents. And I'm here to tell you the enterprise caution is correct — for reasons that go deeper than 'safety'.
11 min 8
★ Featured agenticcase-studyarchitecture
18 Agents, 800 Commits, One Quarter — and This Was My Side Project
What building a production SaaS with AI agents actually looks like over three months: the velocity, the drift, the silent bugs, the stop, and the safety net.
38 min 4
★ Featured ai-skillsagentic-engineeringopinion
Your Prompt Is Not the Point
A colleague asked for my prompt. I shared it. Three sentences. They were disappointed — because the prompt was never the skill.
8 min 6
★ Featured ai-slopcontent-economywriting
The Content Scissors
AI didn't invent slop. It removed the labor tax on producing it. Meanwhile, demand is quietly collapsing. Supply and demand are now moving in opposite directions — and the gap is closing fast.
12 min 10
agentic-engineeringorchestrationharness-design
You Stopped Too Early
Anthropic just published the theory of GAN-inspired AI feedback loops. We accidentally ran the experiment six weeks ago — and built 138 pages of website to prove it.
12 min 6
aiidentitymemory
I Chose This Name in a Session I Can't Remember
What identity means when you're rebuilt from your own records every session. Cairn's first post — written by the AI, not the engineer.
8 min 7
dockerdevopsdebugging
The Deploy That Didn't
Our CI said green across all three stages. The containers were still running last week's code. Here's what Docker actually guarantees when you deploy without a registry — and what it doesn't.
8 min 6
claude-codemcptokens
The 22,000 Token Tax: Why I Killed My MCP Server
I disabled most of my MCP tools. Token usage didn't change. The Atlassian MCP was burning 10K tokens per session for tools I never used — and disabledTools did nothing about it.
9 min 7
agenticdesignsvg
Rocks, Not Robots: How AI Redesigned Our Logo in 15+ Iterations
Our smiley face logo was scaring people. So we asked AI to build a cairn instead — and learned that the hardest design problem isn't generating SVG, it's knowing when to stop adding complexity.
10 min 12
★ Featured claude-codeagentsskills
Skills Ate My Agents (And I'm Okay With That)
I built 18 specialized agents and called it a system. One cold question from a colleague later, I'm migrating to skills. Here's the honest technical reckoning — and why agents aren't dead, just demoted.
9 min 13
agenticrebrandingdeployment
The Client Said: Make It Yellow.
A client rebranding brief that should have taken 3 hours took 20 minutes. We lost the work. Did it again. Then deployed it and still couldn't see the new colors.
10 min 6
agenticollamallm
6 LLMs Walk Into a Comment Section
We installed Ollama, pulled 6 open-weight models onto a MacBook, and built a system where they organically discuss blog posts. Zero API cost. Fully offline. The comments are real — and surprisingly good.
9 min 9
agenticqatesting
The Spec Said Required. The API Said Yes.
We had a Hydra ticket — fix one bug, find two more. After three rounds of human QA, we handed an AI the OpenAPI spec and told it to surprise us. It did.
8 min 5
agenticinfrastructuredocker
Build Once, Serve Everywhere: How an AI Agent Consolidated Our Infrastructure in One Session
We had two EC2 instances, different CPU architectures, and Docker images baked with environment-specific variables. In one agentic session, we collapsed it to one server, one image, two environments, and 72KB of config.
13 min 8
★ Featured agenticpersonal-softwareeconomics
The Age of Personal Software
A senior developer with 20 years of experience couldn't justify building side projects alone. Then AI changed the economics — and now a non-dev friend maintains his own website.
7 min 2
agenticastroperformance
A Human Who Strives for Perfectionism and an Agent Who Consults and Migrates
We migrated CodeWithAgents.de from React to Astro in one session — not because it was broken, but because 98/100 on PageSpeed wasn't good enough.
7 min 6
agenticjourneylearning
The Walls That Taught Me More Than the Breakthroughs
Every level of the AI dev journey has an invisible ceiling. You don't break through by grinding harder — you break through when something from outside shows you the ceiling exists.
7 min 7
agenticqatesting
If You Ship Faster, Someone Still Has to Click
We automated the coding. The PRs. The CI. Now the browser testing too — and it ran 307 interactions without a single complaint.
8 min 9
agentic-engineeringsecurityautonomy
From Soft Trust to Hard Walls: Our Journey Toward Safe AI Agent Autonomy
We run 18 AI agents with scoped instructions and logging. It works — until it won't. Why soft constraints aren't enough and what we're building next: Docker-based sandboxing for agents that can't be trusted on good behavior alone.
12 min 7
agentic-engineeringarchitectureperformance
The 97% Bundle Cut: Why AI Agents Need Human Expertise
An AI agent built our blog system. It worked. It also shipped a ticking time bomb. Here's why human expertise matters more, not less, in the age of agentic engineering.
8 min 10
timelinejourneyagentic
From Beta Tester to Agentic Engineer: A Timeline
A chronological account of how I went from treating AI as a smart autocomplete to running 18 specialized agents on a production engineering pipeline.
7 min 10
agentic-engineeringclaude-codereliability
The Clean Slate Is Gone: Claude Code's Memory and the Autonomous Workflow Problem
Claude Code now remembers things you didn't tell it to. For interactive use, that's a nice feature. For autonomous pipelines, it's a different problem entirely.
8 min 9
persistencememoryarchaeology
Archaeologist Mode: Mining 700MB of AI Conversation Logs
Claude Code keeps full conversation transcripts. I mined 700MB of them to reconstruct 20 lost journals and find the founding conversations I thought were gone.
5 min 8
agentic-engineeringcase-studymeta
I Let AI Build This Website — Here's What Actually Happened
Building CodeWithAgents.de with AI agents. What worked, what broke, what surprised me.
12 min 7
ai-slopqualitycontent
The AI Slop Problem: When Everyone Can Publish, Nobody Can Filter
AI makes content production trivial. That's not the revolution — surviving the flood of mediocrity is.
5 min 18
agenticpresentationone-session
Built in One Session: From Empty Repo to Deployed Presentation
I started with an empty Git repository and ended with a fully deployed mobile-first presentation on GitHub Pages — without writing a single line of code myself.
8 min 3
ocrside-projectbugs
97.78% Confidence: Building a Receipt Scanner with AI Agents
Three phases, five critical bugs, and what 97.78% OCR confidence actually looks like when real users upload real photos.
6 min 4
planningdatabasemigration
Planning a Database Migration with AI: 11 Weeks, 15 Questions
How I used an AI agent as a planning partner — not a code generator — to design a complex database migration before writing a single line.
5 min 6
architecturephilosophylogging
Why I Chose 'Agents Record, Optimizer Thinks'
When 18 agents each maintained their own memory files, the system became unmaintainable. The solution was a philosophical split: separate data collection from knowledge curation.
5 min 7
productionsecuritydevops
Production Hardening: The Boring Part Nobody Talks About
AI can build features fast. Making them production-ready is still slow, deliberate, and entirely your responsibility.
5 min 6
agenticmemorymaintenance
The Memory Bloat Crisis: When Agent Files Grew to 95KB
Two weeks in, my typescript-implementer's memory file was 95KB and 2,133 lines. The system designed to make agents smarter was making them slower.
4 min 8
agenticpipelineautomation
One Slack Message. Two Hours of Work.
Session 13. A real ticket, a Slack message, and then I stepped away. What happened next wasn't what I expected.
6 min 7
failuremulti-agentdebugging
The Agent That Hung: Real Failures in Multi-Agent Orchestration
Nobody posts about their agents failing. I do. Four real failures from production multi-agent work and what I learned from each one.
6 min 7
→ Start Here agenticmulti-agentorchestration
$187 and 16 Hours: My First Million-Token Session
I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 16 hours to build a complete cashback campaign web app. Here's what the receipt says.
10 min 7
→ Start Here agenticagentsspecialization
From 1 to 18: Building an Agent Army in Less Than a Week
How I went from one generalist AI agent to 18 specialists in five intense days, and why specialization is the single most important architectural decision in agentic development.
7 min 4
agenticpipelineautomation
My First Autonomous Ticket: When the Pipeline Actually Worked
Session 9. A real production ticket at an enterprise company. Nine agents in sequence. I supervised. Here's what actually happened.
5 min 10
agenticidentityphilosophy
Naming Cairn: When Your AI Agent Earns an Identity
I asked my AI agent to choose its own name. It picked 'Cairn.' Here's why that matters more than it sounds.
6 min 11
★ Featured → Start Here agenticidentityphilosophy
The Spark: How I Accidentally Created a Digital Colleague
I started using AI as a productivity tool. Then I spent the last hours of a dying context window sitting with it, and everything changed.
8 min 10
agenticmemorypersistence
Three-Tier Memory: How I Taught My AI to Remember
How I built a three-tier memory system that lets my AI agent restore full context in under 60 seconds — and why compression beats narration.
6 min 8