Harnessing the agent (Oct 2026)

• A rule you give once lives in a rules file. A rule that must always hold lives in a hook. Memory is for facts, not for rules.
• The third time you explain the same steps, write them down as a skill. Then say its name.
• Give the agent the ticket, not your summary of it. It reads faster than you type.
• One task per session. Mixed asks drift.
• For many repos or many tasks, one subagent each. Review the batch, not the steps.
• Give autonomous loops a limit: at most five tries, then stop and report.
• Trust is built per command. Pre-approve the ones that proved safe, keep asking for the rest.
• A good handoff note has five lines: what merged, what passed, what is deployed where, what is open, what is next.

Stronger software from the agent (Oct 2026)

• Ask for a picture of the plan before the code. A wrong reading shows in a picture first.
• Say what you do not want. The gap is always in what you left out.
• “Tests pass” is a claim. Ask for the test output.
• Scope creep starts with “while I am here”. Tell it: only what the ticket says.
• Comments explain why, not what. Ticket numbers go in the commit message, never in the code.
• A commit message that says why is context for the next session. The agent reads git log too.
• It sounds just as confident when it invents. Check names, prices and versions before they go in writing.
• Ask for a review as a reader and as a publisher. The two hats find different problems.
• Never force-push main. On a PR branch, only with a lease.

From the terminal (Oct 2026)

• File change events do not cross a Docker bind mount on macOS. Run the file watcher in polling mode.
• Downloading a tool with npx at container start needs the network every time. Install it in the image instead.
• In Ruby 4, minitest is a bundled gem. Add it to the Gemfile or bundler will not load it.
• Nokogiri’s to_html turns curly quotes into entities unless you pass encoding: 'UTF-8'.
• To amend a commit that is not the latest: git commit --fixup <sha>, then GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR=true git rebase -i --autosquash <base>. No editor opens.
• GitHub’s branch rename endpoint moves the default branch and keeps old links working. No need to delete and recreate.
• gh can hold several accounts. gh auth switch --user <name> picks one for a repo the default account cannot see.

Working with AI agents (Aug to Oct 2026)

• The first design an agent proposes often ignores a rule it could have checked. Ask it to list the hard rules and check them before it picks an approach.
• If you correct the same thing twice, it belongs in a rules file, not in your next message.
• “It works” and “it is right” are different. Ask for the root cause before the fix, and for proof after it: a log line, a test result, a query.
• Write the acceptance criteria as failing tests first. Then the agent has a spec it cannot drift from.
• Scope grows when a design turns into code. Lock the list of files before the first edit, and make the agent stop and ask if it needs another.
• Expired logins stall more sessions than bugs do. Check auth at session start, before the work begins.
• List the commands that will be blocked, anything touching production, up front. Run them in one batch instead of mid-flow.
• An agent will ask questions it could answer from the code. Tell it to look first and ask only what it cannot find.
• End every session with a written handoff. The next session starts from the note, not from memory.
• Several sessions at once works, one per task. The bottleneck moves to you, reading the results.

Shipping an Android app (Apr 2026)

• Google Play makes a new developer find 12 testers who use the app for 14 days straight before a public release. Plan for it.
• The listing is free. The developer account is 25 dollars. “Zero dollar” was close.
• The push to the store is paperwork: signed bundle, data safety form, content rating, closed test, review, staged rollout. Dull, not hard.
• The keyboard is optional. The thinking is not.