AI

I recently ran an internal session for a semi-technical audience with the title “What makes an agent, an agent?” When I proposed the subject, the concept was met with real enthusiasm, which I took as a sign that people would welcome a plain answer to a question they are assumed to have settled already. The word “agent” is used so loosely at the moment that people who build these systems will each give you a different answer about what it means....

Last week I built and deployed an application where Claude Code wrote every line of the code. I did this deliberately, outside my core professional expertise, and with enough at stake to take the governance seriously. Working through it brought something into focus that I keep returning to in conversations with engineering leaders about AI-assisted delivery. The term “vibe coding” is both accurate and misleading. Accurate, because there genuinely is something collaborative in a good session with an AI coding assistant, where you describe what you want, it responds, you refine, it adapts....

The vast majority of AI adoption conversations focus on large-scale enterprise deployments, but a lot of value is already coming from something quieter: small, task-specific agents built to support our day to day work. I built one of these systems by connecting Claude Code to my Obsidian vault. It extracts tasks from emails, assembles context before meetings, and checks consistency across notes. It wasn’t just search anymore, it could read the notes and do something useful with them....

I’ve woken the machines in my home lab for a while now with a small Python script called wake, which sends a Wake-on-LAN packet to whichever host I name. It does the job, although it doesn’t tell me whether the machine has actually come up, so I usually follow it with a few pings before I try to connect. One Sunday afternoon I asked Claude Code to turn the script into a proper Mac app, and I pointed it at an older Linux version of the script that waits for the host to answer and then opens an SSH session....