The hackathon Anthropic didn't expect

A small detail from a Boris Cherny interview points at a bigger story than the one the headlines told.

June 2, 2026 · 5 min · Russell

Agent-friendly JSON output for PHP CI tools

How the waaseyaa/agent-output package shrinks PHPUnit, PHPStan, and bin/check-* output to compact NDJSON envelopes so AI agents do not drown their context window in CI noise.

May 24, 2026 · 5 min · Russell

AI keeps speccing my projects on pre-AI timelines

AI assistants estimate effort using training data from before they existed, then push back when you try to spec faster. Working around it eats hours every week.

May 24, 2026 · 5 min · Russell

Spot the AI: can you tell which passage Claude wrote?

A small web game that shows you two short passages — one human, one Claude — and asks you to pick which one is the AI.

May 23, 2026 · 1 min · Russell

Bumping a PHP monorepo to 8.5: the mechanics

Sixty-seven packages, one CI matrix, one PHPStan target. What it takes to actually move the floor.

May 11, 2026 · 4 min · Russell

PHP 8.5 restraint: features we did not adopt

An upgrade is also a decision about what not to use. Property hooks, the pipe operator, and an array_find pass we mostly rejected.

May 11, 2026 · 6 min · Russell

Spec Kitty mission lifecycle: a domain modeling pass through Giiken

What a full Spec Kitty mission actually looks like end to end: spec, plan, tasks, implement, review, merge.

May 11, 2026 · 3 min · Russell

The PHP 8.5 deprecation sweep: from 34 warnings to zero

Three deprecation categories. Twenty-nine call sites. A test corpus that surfaces them all.

May 11, 2026 · 4 min · Russell

A beginner's guide to Git worktrees: What they are, why they matter, and how to use them without breaking anything

Learn what Git worktrees are, why they exist, and how to use them safely with a beginner-friendly workflow.

April 15, 2026 · 5 min · Russell

Hugo blog shortcodes: adding a visual component system to PaperMod

Six Hugo shortcodes that give your PaperMod blog callouts, steps, pull quotes, stats, before/after comparisons, and CTAs — built in one vibe coding session.

April 8, 2026 · 5 min · Russell