AI has made me _dramatically_ faster at building software. You can see it on my GitHub: a sudden surge of activity at the start of September, several projects started, and a few of them actually shipped. That part isn't up for debate. I can go from an idea to a working prototype in a day. I can as...
Read articleWe are excited to announce the winners of our [DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition](https://dev.to/devteam/join-our-dev-weekend-challenge-generosity-edition-1000-in-prizes-across-five-winners-20en)! We asked you to build something in the spirit of generosity and left the interpretation wide o...
Read article--- title: "The Physics of Socratic Prompting: Somatic Recoil, Chess Alpha-Beta, & The NLP Meta-Model" description: Why scalar RLHF fails at credit assignment, why barking direct code fixes turns you into an exhausted human compiler, and how Socratic questioning plus topological scars prune doomed s...
Read articleThe most dangerous government AI strategy in 2026 is also the most fashionable: treating autonomy as the goal. In April 2026, GAO reported that federal agencies more than doubled AI use from 2023 to 2024, even as acquisition teams still faced gaps in technical expertise and cost visibility. Spee...
Read article--- title: Structs Aren't on the Stack. How C# Actually Manages Memory. published: true description: The biggest myth in C# is that structs live on the stack and classes live on the heap. Here is what the CLR actually does with your data. tags: csharp, dotnet, programming, beginners cover_image: htt...
Read articleI've been on a bit of a "install random dev tools and see if they actually hold up" kick lately, and this time I pointed it at Dopbase. It's a secrets manager that claims to be a server, admin UI, REST API, and CLI all packed into one binary. No sponsorship, nobody paid me for this, I just grabbed ...
Read articleAI is moving relatively fast, despite being slow down. Yes, it feels like there's a new concept to learn every ~~week~~ day. In an effort to actually understand this mad new world instead of just skimming past it, (and to remind myself there's not an 8-ball inside the machine), I've been writing ELI...
Read article*What a refractometer taught me about observability* [In July](https://www.kenwalger.com/blog/ai/mcp/the-field-agent-sovereign-vineyard-mcp/?utm_source=dev_to&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=systems_under_fermentation), I wrote about a farmer walking a vineyard row at dawn, crushing a grape onto a ...
Read articleI use AI constantly when I code and when I write. I use it to research ideas, plan code, debug, explore unfamiliar APIs, review architecture, generate tests, explain weird behavior, and write chunks of code faster than I could manually. I also think it can make you worse at programming. **Those t...
Read articleSo I did the thing everyone tells you not to do. I took the whole codebase. Every route, the migrations, the config, that `utils.ts` nobody's touched since 2023. Dumped all of it into a model with a context window big enough to swallow the entire repo in one go, and asked it one question: "What's...
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