fishdan

Category: Uncategorized

  • Postman Saves My Ass (Again): Using AI to Turn Your API Into a CI Safety Net

    Postman Saves My Ass (Again): Using AI to Turn Your API Into a CI Safety Net

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    dan

    /** AI used to format this article and clean up typos **/ The Prompt That Changes Things If you’ve got an API, try telling your AI this: “I want a Postman suite that gives me complete coverage of my API, that I can run locally but also runs as a GitHub Action when anyone makes…

  • Database Best Practices: Designing for Failure, Not Hope

    Database Best Practices: Designing for Failure, Not Hope

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    dan

    What Prompted This Post Two days ago, the founder of PocketOS shared a now-viral account of how an AI coding agent deleted his company’s production database—and the backups along with it—in a single automated action. With no viable recovery path, the team was forced to restore from a three-month-old backup that had only existed for…

  • Turning a Product Into a System of Truth: Why We Built product.json

    Turning a Product Into a System of Truth: Why We Built product.json

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    dan

    Most product teams have a quiet problem they don’t talk about enough: Everyone is working from a slightly different version of the product. Sales is pitching what they think exists.Product is planning what should exist.Engineering is building what was specified—weeks or months ago. And then AI shows up, and suddenly that ambiguity isn’t just inefficient—it’s…

  • AI + Speckit: Turning Observability into Faster, More Predictable Engineering

    AI + Speckit: Turning Observability into Faster, More Predictable Engineering

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    dan

    TL;DR Put this prompt into your AI Assistant: “I want to increase observability in my legacy project, and make it a critical component of all future development using speckit.” If you’re managing an engineering team, you already know this pattern: The issue isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of structured insight. Combining AI…

  • OpenClaw, Codex, and the Billing Trap *Again*

    OpenClaw, Codex, and the Billing Trap *Again*

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    dan

    I thought I had already learned this lesson. I had written it down once: do not put OPENAI_API_KEY in a global shell environment when using Codex over VS Code Remote SSH. ChatGPT billing and OpenAI API billing are separate systems. If Codex sees an API key, it may use API billing instead. That mistake cost…

  • Building Cheap, Rule-Driven Gmail Alerts with IMAP and OpenClaw

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    dan

    See an important follow up to this post first! I wanted a simple system: watch Gmail for messages that actually matter—especially job application replies—and send a WhatsApp alert when something actionable shows up. The first version worked. It was also unnecessarily complicated. What I really needed was something predictable, cheap to run, and easy to…

  • How I F-ed up the OpenClaw/Codex install (again)

    How I F-ed up the OpenClaw/Codex install (again)

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    dan

    I’ve been a ChatGPT Plus user for about two years. I’m a developer, and I use Codex constantly—it’s easily my preferred AI for coding. Most of my work happens over Remote SSH on a headless Ubuntu box I run called NATHAN. It sits quietly on my local subnet behind a firewall, doing real work. This…

  • AI for Public Good: Can We Patent Future Meds to Benefit Humanity?

    AI for Public Good: Can We Patent Future Meds to Benefit Humanity?

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    dan

    There’s an uncomfortable idea I can’t shake: What if the only way to keep the future of medicine open… is to grab it first? That sounds aggressive—because it is. But it might also be necessary. The Problem: Innovation Gets Locked Up Modern medicine doesn’t just run on science—it runs on intellectual property. When a company…

  • AI and Guns: Power, Risk, and the Illusion of Control

    AI and Guns: Power, Risk, and the Illusion of Control

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    dan

    There’s a comparison people don’t like to make—but probably should: artificial intelligence and guns. At first glance, they seem worlds apart. One is software; the other is hardware. One lives in data centers; the other in holsters and safes. But at their core, both are immensely powerful tools that amplify human capability. And that amplification…

  • Why VS Code Wasn’t Updating on Ubuntu (and the surprisingly annoying fix)

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    dan

    I ran into something recently that felt simple on the surface but turned into a bit of a rabbit hole: VS Code just… wasn’t updating. No errors. No warnings. Just silently stuck on an old version while everything else on the system updated fine. And every time I started VSCode it said “There is a…

  • AI Is Like Hiring 1,000 Junior Engineers Overnight

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    dan

    There’s a lot of excitement around AI writing code. And that excitement is justified. AI can produce code faster than any individual developer ever could. It can scaffold services, write tests, generate APIs, and even refactor existing systems. But the best way to understand AI isn’t as a replacement for engineers. It’s as something else…

  • When they lay you off too soon

    When they lay you off too soon

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    dan

    When I was working for Palm, I came to them because they bought out startup AnyDay.com. If you believe in patents, which I don’t, we invented the online calendar, which is why they bought us. After the dotcom crash at the end of 2001, Palm decided in their shortsighted way that their future was as…

  • The Gambler

    The Gambler

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    dan

    I made a open source project on GitHub called “Gambler” that uses SpecKit plus the AI agent of your choice to assist you in making gambling decisions. It prompts your for all the relevant information you gave give it — either URLS or you can cut and paste stuff. Tell it all the factors you…

  • Vibe Coding Needs Guardrails: Why Rigid Ecosystems Are Safer for AI-Generated Code

    Vibe Coding Needs Guardrails: Why Rigid Ecosystems Are Safer for AI-Generated Code

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    dan

    AI-assisted programming has quietly created a new development style: vibe coding. You describe what you want.The model produces code.You skim it, maybe run it, tweak a few things, and keep moving. Sometimes it’s astonishingly productive. A feature that might have taken an hour appears in seconds. But vibe coding changes something fundamental about software development:…

  • How I didn’t get scammed by AI

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    dan

    I got a SMS message from a friend I loosely know. We’re FB friends and we’ve met IRL twice. They are also a *serious* player in the startup space — and I have a startup looking for financing. Here’s how the conversation went. This is where I think they are probing me to find out…

  • Older Engineers better prepared for AI

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    dan

    There’s a narrative forming in tech that AI is a young engineer’s tool. The assumption is that younger developers will adopt it faster, integrate it more naturally, and ultimately dominate in an AI-assisted development world. I’m not convinced. Older engineers may be uniquely equipped to use AI effectively. AI Makes the Same Mistakes as Junior…

  • Software Engineering Isn’t That Hard. Architecture Is.

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    dan

    There’s a belief in our industry that building software is incredibly hard. It isn’t. Writing code that works? That’s increasingly easy. Even “simple” AI systems can generate functional microservices with decent structure and solid test coverage. Given a clear task, modern AI can scaffold APIs, wire up a database, add authentication, and produce a respectable…

  • Fix the “Everything Is Out of Date” Problem on Windows Dev Machines

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    dan

    If you only open some developer tools occasionally, you’ve seen this: Open the tool → giant update → wait before you can work. This happens because Windows does not centrally update developer software. Many tools ship their own updaters, and they only run when you launch the application. Windows already has the solution: winget, the…

  • AWS Secrets Manager vs. SSM Parameter Store

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    dan

    If you build on AWS long enough, you’ll eventually face the same question: Where should we store secrets and configuration? Keeping stuff in a local env file or applications.properties means either those files are going to get checked in, or even worse, casually shared between engineers. And what if your builds are made in a…

  • From Power to Precision: Why Terraform Is the Missing Layer for Scalable Windows Workstations on Azure

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    dan

    Executive Summary On-demand cloud workstations unlock powerful, cost-efficient computing for engineering teams. But as organizations scale beyond a handful of machines, a new challenge emerges: consistency. Manually configuring Windows systems through portals, scripts, and remote desktop sessions introduces drift, delays, and operational risk. This paper explores how Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) transform Azure-based…