As our Raleigh office settled into its new space, we kept coming back to one question: what should we do with our entryway? There’s a big wall visible right from the elevators, which is the first thing people see when they step into Atomic Object Raleigh. We decided to bring in a local artist, Bella...

For most of software’s history, the limit on what you could ship was your hands: how fast you could type, how much you could get built before the day ran out. Agents lifted that limit. A developer can now run several streams of work at once and get through more in an afternoon than used […] The post...

Coding agents are getting pretty good at building screens from a screenshot, Figma link, or a loose description of what you want. But “pretty good” can still mean a lot of small cleanup work: the button is almost right, the spacing is close, the font weight is questionable, and the loading state som...

As an American adopted from China, I have always wanted to learn Mandarin to connect more with my culture. After enrolling in a local beginner Mandarin course, I decided I wanted to use flashcards to supplement my learning. I tested out a few flashcard apps, but wasn’t fully satisfied with any of th...

I went into a recent project excited. The newer LLM tools had crossed a threshold for me. They felt like something I could finally lean on hard for a tricky visual-design problem: cross-domain research, concept generation, and prototyping all running in one loop. I was genuinely confident going in. ...

It’s three in the afternoon, and Claude Code asks me, for the 40th time today, whether it can run a command. I glance at it, hit Allow, and keep moving. I didn’t really read it. The thirty-ninth time, I didn’t read that one either. That reflex is the problem. Every permission prompt is supposed to [...

I am no stranger to working up and down the stack. To me, it’s part of the challenge, and I love a complex chunk of work. I will choose stories in the backlog requiring parallel frontend and backend changes just for fun. Lately, I have come to appreciate how simple tools like Swagger make it […] The...

In the past few years, AI has woven itself into nearly every corner of how we work, communicate, and make decisions. Hiring algorithms screen (and discard) resumes before a human ever reads them. Automated systems flag fraud, recommend medical treatments, and help determine prison sentences. The ass...

I sat across from Michael Levy at a room full of healthcare and technology leaders recently. We were talking about why digital transformation projects fail at such a startling rate, 95% of them, by some estimates. His answer surprised the room. It wasn’t the technology, the budget, or the vendor. It...

My current software project had an issue, and, over time, it has become more of an issue as coding agents have gotten better. That problem is running parallel agents in our codebase while providing them strong methods to validate their work. The codebase was started in 2021. That’s before agentic co...

Perhaps due to working with AI coding agents inside of a VM, I’ve found myself spending more time in terminal applications lately. Terminal Applications In addition to the agent harness applications, I’ve also been using several other TUI (Terminal User Interface) applications heavily. lazygit – a t...

I recently started creating a real-time ship combat game where multiple players compete to be the last one standing. The game needs to be playable over LAN, and I would like to create SDKs for developers to write bots to play in addition to human players playing themselves. To achieve this, I first ...

During the definition and planning phase of our current project, my team generated a lot of written specs. Seventeen feature specs, plus a PRD, a data model, and a handful of supporting reference docs. All of them are in Markdown, all living in the repo. That’s great for handing context back to an A...

I would bring my cats everywhere with me if I could, including to work. Since that’s not really an option, I decided to make them part of my Codex setup instead. I used codex-pets.net to turn my two tabby cats into a custom Codex Pet. To upload a Codex Pet, you need two files: pet.json […] The post ...

Years ago, I started a Zettlekasten-style collection of notes using Emacs’ org-roam package. A Zettlekasten system is typically comprised of hundreds of linked notes covering all topics of interest to the maintainer (if you’re interested in learning more on such systems, I recommend the book How To ...

My partner is a full-time artist, and a lot of that work comes from art commissions. And it isn’t a small amount of commissions either. There are some points where he takes up to 90 commissions at once. And for a long time, the whole operation ran on sticky notes. To me, the process was […] The post...

Frontier AI models today are incredibly powerful. They excel not just at writing bits of code but also at assisting with planning and architecture. They are also increasingly expensive. Early on in the AI era, developers had the luxury of tossing around tokens willy-nilly, delegating any task imagin...

For most of my career, I had a decent sense for answering two questions: how much work is ready to go, and how long is it going to take? I could look at a healthy backlog with a couple of weeks of estimated stories, do some math, and give a pretty good guess of what […] The post Human Habits for Lea...

Rails gave web developers a durable caching model. Cache the outer fragment. Reuse the inner fragments that did not change. The Rails caching guide calls this Russian doll caching. You Can Use Russian Doll Caching at the Edge. The same idea now applies outside the template. The dolls can span the br...

More than once in my career, I became that architect: the one the support team calls when something breaks in production, when a change request related to a complex feature is raised, or when a new team member needs to understand why the system works the way it does. Requirements documents, use case...

I live in a small apartment in Chicago with no closets, which means storage is not something I can take for granted. It is an ongoing design challenge. So, I’ve had to get creative. Every square foot has to earn its keep, while still feeling aesthetically like “me.” I built an open-shelf “closet” in...

If you want to see where clinical AI actually breaks, skip the vendor deck. Watch season two, episode six, of The Pitt. Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) rolls out an AI tool that writes the charts. It cuts documentation time by eighty percent. More time at the bedside. More time at home. Who say...

The longstanding adage that communication is key will ring true perpetually, especially when executing software delivery. Proper communication has the power to set the foundation for a project to either consistently thrive or create continuous bottlenecks that adversely impact productivity. The reci...

To lay things out on the table, this isn’t an “AI Bad, Humans Good” blog post. No-code tools have made it easier for non-developers to prototype basic apps, and coding agents have made it quicker for developers to get the first pass of a feature written. Agentic development hasn’t made writing human...

Shadcn is a set of reusable UI component patterns for use with React applications. However, instead of importing the elements like a traditional component library (@somewhere/ui), you add a local copy of the component source files into your project. This allows you to customize, extend, and shape th...

With the recent changes in agentic delivery, costs of development are going down, and processes are changing. That means there’s more time to try different methods and figure things out. Software today can still be clunky and irritating, with systems that take a lot of manual effort to glue together...

Agentic Android development works best when agents can build, install, run, test, and validate features against real devices or emulators without relying on Android Studio as the manual control center. In this article, “skills” means reusable agent instructions for a specific task, and “workflows” m...

As a software developer at Atomic Object, one of the expectations (and perks) of the job is taking advantage of professional development opportunities outside of work. Recently, I attended Code Remix, a developer-centric conference in Miami as my annual professional development experience. Through t...

For the past four months, I have been volunteering with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) initiative as a facilitator running creative writing workshops inside Ann Arbor prisons. Coincidentally, here at Atomic Object, I am currently working on a team creating digital systems for the Michigan C...

We’re in a time of accelerated innovation. Some say the AI bubble is going to pop, while some are betting everything on it being the future. As a participant in the development industry, sticking your head in the sand can be fatal. Yet, hopping on the hype train can seem intimidating or feel aimless...