Writing

Cost Awareness Is Part of Implementation

Split Parallel Decisions into Parallel Sessions

When Docs Lie, Read the Source

CLAUDE.md Is Your Project's Runbook

Production Surfaces Bugs Your Tests Can't

When the Obstacle Isn't the Real Obstacle

Scope Discipline: One 12-Item Request, Three Focused PRs

Real-time documentation: writing while you build, not after

CLAUDE.md, BACKLOG.md, and WORKING-WITH-JONLIN.md weren't documentation in the after-the-fact sense. They were a load-bearing part of how I built. Here's why.

Two-model architecture: Haiku for chat, Sonnet for assessment

Same site, two AI features, two models. The decision wasn't about cost — it was about matching the model to the task. Here's the framework.

Recommendation + Tradeoff Beats a Menu Every Time

Explicit Guardrails Become Persistent Guardrails

The Outage That Turned into a Memory File

From a PRD to a Deployed Multi-User Web App in Four Days

How a Karaoke Song Became a Language Learning Tool

Studying to sing