The Instrument and the Ledger
In June I itemized the AI subsidy by hand. This month I built the instrument that does it for me. It took an afternoon, and it was built by the very thing it measures.
★tag · 12 essays
#claude-code
All essays tagged claude-code.
The Subsidy, Itemized
Twenty-six days of Claude Code showed $2,556 of API-priced work against a $200 subscription. The lesson was not the total. It was cache behavior, model routing, and a government kill switch that landed in my usage chart. Value lives in verified outcomes, not tokens, and the work has to survive the stop.
★The Agent Team Tax: When AI Agents Need to Argue
Claude Code agent teams are powerful, but they are not faster subagents. They earn their cost only when the work needs real peer challenge, not polite parallel execution.
AI Did Not Configure My Network. It Helped Me Understand It.
A weekend home-networking project became a practical lesson in AI-assisted reasoning, documentation, guardrails, and engineering judgment.
Spec, Standards, Specialists: How I Actually Build with AI
The strategy posts say AI software development is a system. Here is the working loop I run inside that system: a refined specification, a layer of standards, and a coordinated set of specialists doing the work.
★Claude Code Is a Build System, Not a Chatbot
After thirteen months of daily Claude Code use, I stopped treating AI coding as a prompt discipline problem and started treating it like an engineering system: configurable, layered, observable, and built to learn.
Eleven Years, One Week, and an AI Co-Pilot: Rebuilding TravelTimes for iOS 26.4
A decade-old side project, six major features, one week. How spec-driven AI-assisted development compressed months of work into a focused sprint on a real codebase with real constraints — and where the AI got it wrong.
From Copy-Paste to Skill: What Thousands of AI Coding Sessions Taught Me About Guardrails
After thousands of sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Kiro, and every other LLM-based CLI and IDE, I distilled what I learned into a reusable Claude Skill. Here's how those lessons became the guardrails that let me move faster and actually trust the output.
They're Using Claude to Ship Claude (And It Shows)
Anthropic has shipped more meaningful product features in the last few weeks than most teams ship in a quarter. A theory — and what it tells us about what AI-assisted development actually unlocks when a team uses their own product to build it.
From iOS to Android in a Weekend: How I Used Claude Code to Build a Complete App Without Writing a Single Line of Code
I took a production iOS app, pointed Claude Code at it, and had a fully functional Android app in eight hours over a weekend. Here's exactly how it worked.
How I Built a Production Notification System for TravelTimes in One Day with Claude Code
From 'users want commute alerts' to 1,800 lines of shipped, App Store-ready code in a single coding session. A deep dive into architecture, edge cases, and what AI-assisted iOS development actually looks like.
Building StillView 3.0: Raising the Quality Bar with Claude Code and Opus 4.5
Using Claude Code and Opus 4.5 as thinking partners helped me rebuild confidence, clarity, and quality in a growing macOS codebase.