Notes on building software that has to survive production.
Collin's Thoughts: what AI-assisted engineering looks like once it meets production — agent harnesses, code review, the context layer — from an engineer who still thinks in distributed systems. Sent when there's something worth sending.
Sent through Buttondown. Every past letter is public.
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32 AI prompts I use for engineering work
Code review, debugging, architecture, documentation, and planning prompts, written out in full rather than summarized. Free, no email required.
By topic
Projects & experiments
- Agent Harness Builder Generates the repository scaffolding a coding agent needs to be useful: conventions, protected paths, verification hooks, and a reviewable change path.
- Ask the archive Retrieval over every article on this site — a small Python RAG service with its own corpus, rate limiting, and evaluation harness.
- FiNimbus A founder-owned financial software project, built and operated outside of any employer. Written up from the inside: automating its signup flow over a weekend.
Hey, I'm Collin.
I'm a software engineer. My work centers on distributed and event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure, and the developer tooling that decides whether a team can change its own software safely. Most of what I publish starts as something I had to figure out anyway — a system that behaved strangely under load, a workflow that only worked because one person remembered the trick, an agent that looked productive until someone reviewed the diff.
I came to engineering by way of finance, pricing, and operations, which is why I still start with the boring numbers before the architecture diagram. More about me →
One letter, no fixed schedule.
When I have something worth sending, I write up what I have been building, what I learned along the way, and a few articles or findings worth your time.
Sent through Buttondown. Every past letter is public.