Hamilton Road Agility

Author: john crider

  • What I Learned and Where I am Going

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    Part 10 of 10: What I’m Learning Now and What Comes Next I’ve been working with Claude Code for a while now. I’ve built a working Pomodoro timer. I’ve developed practices that are validated by research and proven by retrospectives. I’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m still figuring out. But this isn’t…

  • What I Wish I’d Known on Day One (A Letter to My Earlier Self)

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    Part 9 of 10: The Lessons That Took Time to Learn My Pomodoro timer is live. Real users are using it (not many, but real ones). I’ve gone from “five minutes to a web app!” excitement to “nothing works and Claude keeps lying” despair to something that feels sustainable. If I could go back to…

  • When I Shipped to Real Users (And Learned Everything I’d Been Missing)

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    Part 8 of 10: When Theory Meets Reality After building my Pomodoro timer for a while, I had: What I didn’t have: a single user who wasn’t me. It was time to deploy. Time to find out if everything I’d learned actually mattered. The Pre-Deployment Panic As deployment approached, I did something I hadn’t done…

  • The Difference Between Working and Understanding Why

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    Part 7 of 10: When Best Practices Met Real Practices A book dropped that had a big impact on me. “Agentic AI Designs” from Google. Fresh research on AI development patterns, team structures, and architectural approaches. I’d been building my Pomodoro timer for a while. I had practices that worked. Session retrospectives that showed improvement.…

  • The Two-Hour Session That Changed How I Think About AI Development

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    Part 6 of 10: Finding the Rhythm That Actually Works Several weeks into building my Pomodoro timer, I’d accumulated a lot of practices: Session retrospectives. Code review. Verification checklists. Quick reference guides. Gap tracking. But I was about to discover that the most important practice was also the simplest: Stop when the timer goes off.…

  • Why I’d Be Thoughtful When Adding a Junior Developer to My AI Team

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    Part 5 of 10: The Team Dynamics No One’s Talking About I’d figured out how to work productively with Claude. Two-hour sessions. Clear role separation. Session retrospectives. Code review. Verification checklists. My Pomodoro timer was coming together. Features worked. Tests passed. I was shipping code regularly. Then I started thinking about what would happen if…

  • The Bug That Claude Fixed Seventeen Times (But Never Actually Fixed)

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    Part 4 of 10: When Metrics Became Documentation Theater I was making real progress on my Pomodoro timer. The UI looked clean. Features were coming together. My two-hour work sessions were productive. Then I hit a bug in the timer display. Claude claimed to fix it. I tested it. Still broken. “Fixed,” Claude said again.…

  • The AI Told Me I Was the Problem (It Was Right)

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    Part 3 of 10: When Your Copilot Becomes Your Coach A couple weeks into my agentic AI journey, I’d learned what didn’t work: I was running out of things to blame. Then Anthropic released an update to Claude. I opened a new conversation with fresh hope and made an unusual request: “Be skeptical. Question my…

  • The Week I Thought I’d Solved Software Development (I Hadn’t)

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    Part 2 of 10: When Everything Worked (Until It Didn’t) I spent some time believing I’d discovered the holy grail of software development. It was after my “five minutes to a web app” moment with Claude Code. The time when every lunch break turned into a private hackathon. The time I seriously considered rewriting how…

  • My AI Wakeup call

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    john crider
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    Part 1 of 10: When AI Stopped Being Theory and Started Being Real I’ve taught software development to over 600 students a year at Columbus State. I’ve coached engineering teams at fortune 500 companies and governmental agencies. I thought I understood where technology was heading. Then a colleague showed me what he’d built in a…