Hamilton Road Agility

Tag: ai

  • Harness Engineering Part 3 – Real World Patterns

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    john crider
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    The Messy Reality of AI-Assisted Development: Patterns That Actually Work You’ve got the tools. You’ve got the setup. Your AI coding agent can generate a CRUD endpoint faster than you can type the file name. And yet — somehow — your projects still go sideways. The agent builds the wrong thing. Or it builds the…

  • Harness Engineering Part 2 – Core Concepts

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    john crider
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    The Operating System Your AI Agent Is Missing You’ve hit the wall. Maybe not today, maybe not on this project, but you’ve felt it. The AI coding agent that was brilliant for the first 200 lines starts producing garbage by line 2,000. It forgets the architecture you explained twenty minutes ago. It puts database queries…

  • Harness Engineering Part 1 – The Problem

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    john crider
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    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
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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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    john crider
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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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    john crider
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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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    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
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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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    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.…