Limit it, don't inhibit it
A practical way to apply least privilege to a coding agent: a few hard walls, and plenty of room to move inside them.
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#technology
14 posts
Cut along the seams
The cost of building with an agent is the length of the conversation. So the real skill is knowing where to cut a use case into pieces. I found the cut isn't where I expected: not between backend and frontend, but wherever the work first changes a promise to the outside world.
For every token it wrote, 395 were spent re-reading
The cloud bill for building the whole thing was basically nothing. The agent was a different story. And the surprising part isn't the total. It's where the tokens actually went. Part 6 of a series.
The stack is the least interesting part
The site went live for its first real match. People keep asking how it's built. But the architecture was never the interesting question. How much of it I was willing to hand to an agent was. Part 5 of a series.
I told the AI to escalate its own privileges. It refused.
Mid-task, my agent hit a permission it didn't have. I told it to grant itself the capability. It couldn't — and I've come round to thinking that's exactly right. Part 4 of a series.
The day it destroyed production
I gave my AI agent auto-approve on infrastructure changes. It saved me hours — right up until it destroyed my production host. The lesson isn't 'stop automating.' It's about where you put the tripwires. Part 3 of a series.
Give it eyes
My AI agent kept fixing a bug that wasn't fixed. It wasn't a reasoning problem — it was looking at the wrong thing. Part 2 of a series on handing an agent the whole stack.
I handed an AI agent my whole stack
Two seasons ago I shut down a fantasy football app with 500+ users because the operational toil wasn't worth it. Last week I rebuilt it on the Oracle stack — and let an AI agent run everything. Part 1 of a series.
On Netscape, timing, and the work you don't see
CultRepo just released The Java Story. I'm not in it, but the timeline is my whole working life. A few thoughts on timing, stewardship, and the invisible work that keeps a platform alive.
The Algorithmic Ink: Where Singapore Muslim Leaders and Techies Design the Blueprint for Values-Driven AI
Yesterday marked a pivotal moment in Singapore's Muslim community as we hosted Dr. Waleed Kadous for two transformative AI sessions that
Satisfying the ‘-illities’ of an Enterprise Cloud Service.
‘Feature is DONE !’ A regular statement that is typically shared by an overjoyed engineer who is declaring the completion of a feature
VoidDeck Football Covered In the Local News
My daughter was cutting my hair when a message came through from my friend saying, 'Hey, our interview with the journalism undergraduates
License To Print
Papa's Got A Brand New Bag (Toy) ~ James Brown So I did - Got myself what the online community suggested possibly the best value for
Leveraging EDM for the new launch of Masjid Darul Ghufran
Working with Darul Ghufran over the last 3 weeks on how we can keep the community informed towards the official launch of the new mosque