Writing theme
Building software with AI
What changes when AI helps write the code, and the discipline that keeps intent, tests and knowledge connected: spec-driven work and AI in production.
61 articles
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Ithaka Gave You the Journey: AI-Assisted Development
A follow-up to 'The Dependencies I Never Upgraded,' tracing three years of AI-assisted development from a language-blind PHP experiment through the imagination floodgates of agent mode to the specification discipline behind DevSpark.
I'm Not a Game Developer. I Built a Game Anyway.
After one ad too many in a mobile puzzle game, I built my own in a week with Godot and DevSpark, despite never having written a game. The most useful moment was when the code passed every test and the puzzles still weren't fun. I'm asking readers to play it, read the code, and tell me whether shipping makes me a game developer.
DevSpark: Change Must Start With a Real Need
DevSpark grew from a career lesson about building what people actually need rather than what happens to be exciting. This essay connects that discipline to the framework's lifecycle and explains why an agent needs the same product process made explicit.
DevSpark Dogfooding: Escaping the Scope-Creep Spiral
I used DevSpark on real development and watched a system built to control complexity start to generate its own. This essay follows the scope-creep spiral, the rules that broke it, the ideas I wrote down instead of building, and a second project that tested whether the rules held.
Mountains of Misunderstanding: The AI Confidence Trap
The Mountains of Misunderstanding map the gap between what we think we know and what we actually know — a gap that AI widens by packaging fluency as expertise. This article names all six stages of that terrain, restores the weekly practice I use to stay off the mesa, and walks through the year spec-driven development became one way — not the only way — I made the practice structural instead of willpower-based.
Work that shows it
DevSpark: Constitutional AI Governance Framework
DevSpark is a standalone AI-assisted development framework that extends Specification-Driven Development with constitution-based PR reviews, codebase-wide compliance auditing, adversarial risk analysis, brownfield constitution discovery, and adaptive lifecycle management. DevSpark makes project constitutions valuable throughout the entire development lifecycle — from greenfield planning through continuous constitutional governance.
Used across most of my active repositories, including this site
API Test Spark
A NuGet package that embeds an interactive API test harness into any .NET 10 Minimal API with one line of code. It reads the API's own OpenAPI contract, so there is nothing extra to keep in sync.
Thousands of NuGet downloads