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The Pragmatic Engineer interviewed Mitchell Hashimoto about his new way of writing code. The bit that stuck with me: always have an agent running in the background. Don’t wait for it to finish — kick off a task, context-switch to something else, come back when it’s done. Treat agents like background jobs, not pair programmers.

It’s a subtle shift but it changes how you structure your work. You stop thinking sequentially and start thinking in parallel — like managing async workers instead of typing code yourself.

Worth watching: The 5 Levels of AI Coding. A solid framework for thinking about where you actually sit on the AI-assisted development spectrum — from basic autocomplete all the way to fully autonomous agents. Honest about what each level demands from the engineer and where the real productivity gains (and risks) live.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle and kidding ourselves about it. Good gut check.

Watched the Cisco Live 2026 Amsterdam opening keynote. Cisco is going full AI mode — no surprise there, but interesting to see how they’re positioning it across the portfolio. Will be following the rest of Cisco Live remotely to catch the technical sessions and see what’s actually substance vs. slide deck hype.

Testing Claude Code’s new Agent Teams feature — spinning up multiple specialized agents that work in parallel. The tradeoff is clear: order of magnitude speed, order of magnitude risk of technical debt. But having multiple domain experts collaborating (instead of one generalist context-switching) does help catch things.

Already used it to build out this Astro blog. Next experiment: ChessKids — an AI-powered chess tutorial for my 6-year-old daughter. Teaching chess to kids feels like a good test case for agentic workflows: visual, structured rules, incremental difficulty.

Migrated the blog from Ghost to a custom Astro site built entirely with Claude Code. Went with a Cisco CLI-inspired dark-mode design — syslog timestamps, IOS command prompts, terminal aesthetics. The goal was readability first while keeping the network engineering feel baked into the UI.

The whole process was surprisingly straightforward. Astro’s content collections handle MDX well, and having an LLM pair on layout and component decisions made it fast to iterate. Happy with where it landed.