Hamilton Road Agility

Category: ai

  • Harness Engineering Part 1 – The Problem

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    john crider
    in

    Your AI Coding Agent Isn’t Broken. Your Setup Is. You remember the moment it clicked. You opened Claude Code, described an app you’d been thinking about for weeks, and watched it materialize. Routes, database models, a clean React frontend — all from plain English. You shipped a working prototype in a weekend. You told your…

  • What I Learned and Where I am Going

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    john crider
    in

    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…

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

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    john crider
    in

    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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    john crider
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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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    john crider
    in

    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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    john crider
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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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    john crider
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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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    john crider
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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…

  • My AI Wakeup call

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    john crider
    in

    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…