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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
Category Archives: AI
AI adoption, engineering process, and documentation consultancy
I’m available as a consultant on the things I do: helping developers understand AI; interpreting software engineering knowledge in depth; and writing precise documentation that’s easy to understand. Head over to the agency page to discover how to hire Software … Continue reading
Posted in AI, documentation
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End of Line: Replacing MCP with Standard Filesystem Tools
Over on YouTube I shared a video where I demonstrate a more context-efficient approach for integrating existing systems into agentic tools than MCP, one that comes with built in access control mechanisms and that LLMs are already trained to understand: … Continue reading
Posted in AI, tool-support
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Free Software and LLM Contribution Policies
Multiple free software (or open source) projects have policies that forbid, or in some cases allow with extra scrutiny and scepticism, contributions that are supported by AI-augmented tools. I believe that this is a poor decision for many reasons, which … Continue reading
Posted in AI, FLOSS, freesoftware, GNU
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On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the impact of artificial intelligence on work. No technology has ever … Continue reading
Chiron Codex early bird ends soon
Early bird pricing for Chiron Codex ends soon! Join our community of AI-augmented software engineering centaurs now to lock in early access to public content, as well as exclusive videos, book and journal reviews, and more. Ends March 27.
Posted in advancement of the self, AI
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On thinking machines
While Chiron Codex is about the application of LLMs and AI-augmented tools, we also need to understand their meaning to us, each other, and society. I have three topics: intelligence, consciousness, and work: in this part I’ll deal with the first two. Continue reading
Opinionated Read: How AI Impacts Skill Formation
The abstract to this preprint, by two authors both associated with Anthropic, makes the claim “We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding … Continue reading
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Creating “sub-agents” with Mistral Vibe
The vibe coding assistant doesn’t have the same idea of sub-agents that Claude Code does, but you can create them yourself—more or less—from the pieces it supplies. [UPDATE: vibe 2.0 supports subagents directly.] Write the prompt for the sub-agent in … Continue reading
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Announcing Chiron Codex, a community of software centaurs
Software engineers don’t need to outsource our agency to coding agents. We don’t need to give up reading the code, or understanding the problems. We can use AI tools to augment our own capabilities, to improve our engineering knowledge and … Continue reading
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Management is the wrong analogy for LLM augmentation
A common meme at the moment in AI-augmented coding circles is “we are all managers now”, with people expressing the idea that alongside actual programming, programmers now manage their team of agents. This is a poor analogy, in both directions. … Continue reading
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