Atomic’s Agentic Engineering for Teams describes how work moves through a product backlog, definition, planning, implementation, and review when agents do much of the building. While working with a small team during a Research, Design, and Planning (RDP) engagement, I started paying attention to a s...

On a short project, clients need evidence not only that work is happening, but that the team knows when to continue, when to change direction, when to raise concern, and how to leave others capable of carrying the work forward. 1. Close the Feedback Loop – Show Responsiveness. It’s extremely importa...

GitHub Actions are a great way to implement CI/CD into your projects, whether personal or professional. GitHub has a lot of great tools to help with CI/CD, but GitHub Actions in particular is very helpful. However, writing actions can be tedious and a little annoying, especially if you don’t know wh...

The more useful coding agents become, the more access they tend to need. Installing dependencies, running commands, changing files, and generally more autonomy are part of the appeal. They’re also the point where I start thinking about what else the coding agent can reach, especially while these too...

For one of our projects, we run a nightly job that generates a batch of files. It’s a long process: pulling records from an upstream system, calling several APIs to gather info about each one, generating a file per record, and writing the results back to storage. For a small batch, this works fine, ...

I’ve been building out a portfolio site for my creative work. While I have hesitations about mixing AI with my art, I decided to use this website as an opportunity to try out Claude Design. Like most people who’ve tried generating a design with AI, I ran into the same issue over and over. I’d […] Th...

Every developer knows just how important it is to share work with a coworker. If you are working on a critical feature in a crunch, prompt peer reviews and instant feedback can mean the difference between a secure contract and an angry client. So it follows that when the infrastructure we rely on to...

Mixpanel makes it easy to start collecting events and building dashboards. The harder part is knowing whether those dashboards represent real product usage. A report can look polished while counting employees, automated browser tests, web scrapers, duplicate events, or actions that users attempted b...

At Atomic Object, we’re encouraged to prototype and dogfood internal projects. Over the last four months, I’ve been building a prototype to help solve a part of my job that I dislike. The first version used an LLM to extract and classify information from documents, then connect related pieces so hum...

Earlier this year, our team shipped two mobile app features for BIGGBY® COFFEE that both touch real money: applying loyalty rewards to an order at checkout, and adding a tip when you pay. These are exactly the kinds of features you don’t want customers discovering bugs in via one-star reviews. So be...

Recently, I was met with a situation that you do not wish to run into as a software developer. I was playing a game of baseball, and due to a wild pitch, I broke my wrist. This resulted in being put into a cast (and for a moment a sling) that made it very difficult […] The post Review: Codex Tools f...

Crikey! What a sight we have here! We have a flock of software consultants at a common meeting ground for them in their ecosystem, the communal whiteboard. Many moons ago, this was not a particularly common meeting ground for them, but now it’s a place of rigor and banter and full of life. They seem...

Challenging projects are an inevitable part of working in consulting and especially software delivery. Whether it’s navigating a new domain, building trust with a complex client, or ramping up quickly on unfamiliar technology. In those moments, it’s easy to become consumed by pressure, pace, and pro...

The best use of AI I found all year was hiring. This year I used AI to help me fill two roles I had never hired for before: a senior marketing specialist to consult with each of our four regional offices on local marketing needs, and a marketing operations lead to build automations that compress […]...

Every so often, a software development project lands on your desk with the shape already decided. The old system is the villain. It’s written in something nobody wants to touch, it breaks in ways no one can explain, and everyone agrees the answer is to rewrite it on a modern stack, run the project t...

A note from the author: Just before this post was set to be published, a new feature was released on Claude Code that makes this post somewhat obsolete: Claude’s new “Concise” output style. I was sick of scanning through walls of text each time I asked Claude Code a question. Skills like I have ADHD...

Pull request (PR) reviews are one of those engineering practices that almost everyone agrees are important, albeit time-consuming. They help teams catch issues, share knowledge and context within a team, and keep code quality from depending entirely on the author of the first version. However, even ...

In the current AI discourse, particularly when AI is unreliable or misused, it’s often pointed out that AI is simply a tool. This is a fair way to think about it. Like any tool, there are things it’s good for and things it’s not. Some people are better at using it than others. Some folks […] The pos...

As a developer, my friends and family alike have both naturally asked me something along the lines of: “Are you worried about AI taking your job?” I rarely hear the same question from other developers, and I think there’s a good reason for that. These concerns often come from the news, where headlin...

Recently, a partner team on one of my projects unexpectedly stepped away from work we depended on. Without their part, we could not ship the feature we were building. That made the situation both urgent and potentially difficult. A developer on my team had been leading much of the coordination and p...

Atomic Object Raleigh has several ongoing projects, all of which involve varying degrees of AI-assisted coding, as well as some creating agentic applications. Recently I asked other engineers in our office to share their thoughts on Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers. MCP is a standard that lets A...

I recently reviewed the codebase behind a small professional services company’s custom platform. Buried in the source was this: if you send the production system a request with a header named “bypass” and a hard-coded password, you skip login entirely and get administrative access to their productio...

About a mile from the finish on Sunday, I stopped to take in a gel and some water. And my stomach turned over. I was seven and a half miles around Mackinac Island, in a wetsuit, with nothing to do about it. So I breathed. Slow and deliberate, for longer than I wanted to. It […] The post 2 Years, 2 S...

In April, I spent a morning at the Apple Manufacturing Academy Summit at MSU, where Apple and Michigan State train companies to implement AI. The room was operations leadership. People who run the work, not people who write AI strategy memos. A McKinsey presenter put up a spend breakdown for AI depl...

New agent commands and skills are being created all over the interwebs. Most of the daily emails I subscribe to have become a deluge of new agent workflows promising to supercharge my productivity. Until recently, I hadn’t spent much time creating my own agent tools, so in a lot of ways I simply had...

When we moved into our new office, the team had to decide where we’d sit. There were two real options: an area all the way across the floor from the managing partners, or the area right next to them. I said I wanted to be next to them. I was the only one. The pushback […] The post Pick the Desk Wher...

When and how do you surface a concern to your team? We all observe risks, constraints, or areas for feedback on a daily basis: an estimate that the developers feel is unrealistic, a consensus that’s gathering momentum without a team agreement, or a process that’s become more of a hindrance than a he...

I’ve developed a set of tasks where I typically leverage AI. Those are things like generating a test, explaining an unfamiliar corner of a codebase, or answering the little questions that used to cost me a browser tab and 15 minutes of an afternoon. But I’ve started to notice that other developers a...

As a developer, I’m always looking for tools that make my life easier. However, with the never-ending stream of updates Codex provides, I hadn’t taken the time to see what this harness could do for me until I watched a demo of Jason Liu’s setup (developer experience engineer at OpenAI). That demo ma...

I used to think SQLAlchemy was mostly a way to avoid writing SQL. That wasn’t a compelling pitch. I already knew SQL. Why add another abstraction and debug whatever the ORM decided to do behind the scenes? Then I built an endpoint that needed to: Update a document’s status Create signing sessions Wr...