Dr Claire

Join Dana Lawson (Netlify), @danielleleong.com (FireHydrant), and @krider2010.bsky.social (Sailhouse) as they unpack what AI really means for developers today. Learn how to stay creative, productive, and in control of your code in the AI-augmented era. 🗓️ Nov 19 🔗 www.netlify.com/webinars/ai-...

Very much looking forward to this! Sign up link in the thread.

A couple of Negronis and some goldfish crackers. How’s your Sunday afternoon going? (For the tech hustlers, I already used some AI tooling this morning - the afternoon is for relaxing 😉)

LLMs aren’t APIs. You call, you get 200 and vibes. With GPT-5, prompts that worked yesterday may fail today; without you touching code. Models drift. Users blame you. Build for it.

Everyone’s trying to build the optimal AI workflow. Agent infra, eval loops, prompt specs, all wired up before anything works. Using coding assistants is either wild west or over-specced. Try things first. Optimise later.

Engineering is the intersection of Curiosity and Capability When your curiosity outstrips your capability, you expand your capability and grow When your capability expands, it allows you to see farther and grows your curiosity Don't allow your tools take away both your Curiosity and Capability

Everyone thinks AI means fewer engineers. But building secure, resilient systems is still hard. AI gives you leverage. Got a 10% output boost? Use it to build better, ship faster, explore more. Replace waste; not talent!

"You're absolutely right". I mean it's nice to hear that. But I kinda wish I wasn't so right and didn't need to make these corrections 🤣 Thanks Claude Code!

Debugging async systems feels like ghost hunting. Logs say it ran. Retries say it didn’t. The agent? Forgot the plan halfway through. You’re stuck piecing together timelines like a true crime board. And half the time, you still don’t know what happened. What’s your move when async goes sideways?

“Your agent doesn’t need memory.” Cool. Why is it fixing and breaking the same file 3 times in a row? What’s the weirdest state bug you’ve hit in an AI system?

Glue code is never on the roadmap. But it always shows up. And if you ignore it long enough… it ends up running your system. What’s the glue you forgot was critical?

No standups. No tickets for tickets. No “please justify this $12 tool.” Just two people building the thing they wish already existed. What would you nuke from your team’s process if you could?

Most event systems were designed for a time when “real-time” meant “sometime this hour.” Now your agents are spinning off retries, branches, fallback calls, and memory loops. We wrote about why that’s breaking things, and how to fix it without crying: sailhouse.dev/blog/event-i...

Not every event-based system needs a streaming platform. Kafka’s great if you’ve got a team. Most of us? We just want something that works, retries, and doesn’t explode in prod. What do you use?

Leading teams teaches you new pain: - Tech debt as strategy - COGS lurking behind every infra choice - Simplicity beats perfect What’s the leadership lesson you wish you’d learned sooner?

Bank holiday Monday. Drinking a very nice Marzen while working on marketing things for @sailhouse.dev . I know how to have a good time 🤣

Retries aren’t free. Naive retries = failure cascades, duplicated requests, hidden bugs. Retries baked into infra = graceful failure, predictable outcomes. Been bitten by retries in production? Tell me your story.

Distributed monoliths: shiny microservices outside, shared DB and deploy pain inside. Infra should be leverage. Been there? Tell me your best "this was totally decoupled, I swear" story.

I am reminded once again how easily even cursor code can get distracted and just want to complete tasks and stub random things out rather than doing a great job. Perhaps we are closer to the average programmer AGI than we realise 😂

I had a clear out today. Here are two lots of books. I'm giving them away for free, cos I want to. The first pic to a primary school. The second pic to a secondary school. If you'd like them for your school get in touch. I'll choose the schools tomorrow UK only PLEASE SHARE

"It would be [safe], if I was running flyctl in an isolated environment and not on my local machine." Our MCP experiment shows both the power and security considerations of connecting AI to infrastructure tools 🌐 🔗 ➡️ fly.io/blog/30-minu...

America finally broke me. Home after ten days there and at a meal out this evening at a UK food pub. Service? What what feckin service?

People watching is so fascinating!

Any suggestions as to what I should vibe code on this trans atlantic flight?

What I love most is how this demonstrates the power of composable, open tools. @sailhouse.dev + @netlify.com + @resend.com = a solution that would've taken weeks to build from scratch just a few years ago. Fun fact: I broke our own event system while building this :disappear:

I've just told claude code "that's bullshit". How is your day going?!

I wanted to share this for those of you who don't yet know about @codetv.dev (where have you been?!) Jason produces fun, engaging, and educational content. With added 🌶️ (quite literally). I'm a big fan and would love more of you to know about and watch this content.

Pretty good Friday night. Wrangling things for @sailhouse.dev using @anthropic.com cursor code. Despite generally preferring a GUI editor, I'm really getting on with this in the terminal and making rapid progress. Oh yes. And a nice glass of Jura. Well it is Friday!

Claude Code is amazing. So good! Still a huge fan of Cursor but just wow @anthropic.com !

The power of a good haircut! I feel so much better.

💼 Hiring Update👩‍💼 One of my amazing engineers is transitioning to being an Engineering Manager! This leaves an opening for a Senior Backend Java Engineer on my team. The role isn't open quite yet, but I want to get the ball rolling. Descriptions below, please drop your LinkedIn links 🙌

and that also means: devs! if you want to be in an episode of Web Dev Challenge, sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send out a casting call soon 👀 codetv.dev/newsletter

How am I supposed to get on this DeepSeek hype when I keep getting server busy messages in the chat interface? Sigh.

More @bolt.new explorations this weekend. It wrote a @netlify.com function correct first time with a dependency to call an external service! 🤯 Messing around with ideas feels fun again. OK, so it didn't run correctly when first deployed as I'd not set up the third party quite right but that was me🤣

Baby steps. Now let's get on to fixing these things!

Had some amazingly helpful service from @betterstack.com this morning. Very surprised given the state of help@ emails these days. Huge kudos to the team. Definitely a differentiator.

When you push @anthropic.com Claude hard!

Continuing on my path to making the web better, I’m now looking for an organization who needs help operationalizing excellence in frontend and product design so we can ship world-class experiences together 🚀

Love how easy it is to deploy an @astro.build site @netlify.com via @bolt.new 🚀 Yes, I could (and have) crafted by hand but for fun little toys or experiments this is brilliant. And also a great starting point for more complex things. Click a deploy button, hit a claim URL and 💥

Not new news to the @monzo.com and Wises of this world but I am blown away by how in the 19th century banking generally is.

Disappointing experience tonight at @brewdogofficial.bsky.social Waterloo for a special occasion. BUT Danni - absolutely fricking amazing human! Thank you. Please pass this on BrewDog.

Well that’s a new one… Just got a LinkedIn message complaining to me about Notion bugs. Somewhere I’ve never worked. Nor do I talk about on LinkedIn 😵‍💫 From a security person trying to sell to me. Clearly not good at using their hax0r skills to figure out who to contact 🤣

More information on the postponement of today's Merseyside derby. www.evertonfc.com/news/2024/de...