schristoph.online

Code Quality Is the New Infrastructure

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten talks. Ten practitioners from different companies — Anthropic, Google, HashiCorp, Thoughtworks, Answer.AI, Factory, and independent creators. None of them coordinated. All arrived at the same conclusion.

Clean code isn’t a nice-to-have in the age of agents. It’s infrastructure.

I spent the last few weeks watching the Pragmatic Engineer podcast series on AI-assisted software engineering, plus Jeremy Howard’s deep dive on Machine Learning Street Talk and Eno Reyes’s talk at the AI Engineer Summit. These aren’t pundits speculating about the future. They’re builders shipping production software with AI agents every day. And the pattern that emerges across all of them is striking: the bottleneck for agent productivity isn’t model capability. It’s the codebase the model has to work with.

Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Talk That Confirmed What I’ve Been Seeing

Matt Pocock stood on stage at the AI Engineer Summit and said something that most of the audience needed to hear: the developers who succeed with AI coding agents aren’t the ones who delegate everything. They’re the ones who fall back on engineering fundamentals [1].

After 18 months of teaching developers to build with AI agents through his “Claude Code for Real Engineers” course, Pocock has watched the same patterns emerge. The skills that matter aren’t new. They’re decades old. And they didn’t break when AI arrived. They got more important.

On the Loop, Not In It — But Code Quality Still Matters

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the Loop, Not In It — But Code Quality Still Matters

Yesterday one of my AI agents wasted 15 minutes chasing a bug that didn’t exist. The function was called transformPayload(), but it didn’t transform anything. It validated. The agent built three layers of transformation logic on top of it before realizing the name was a lie. I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times now. And it’s exactly why I think Kief Morris’s latest piece gets the big picture right but undersells one critical detail.