📰 Dev.to · Ian Johnson
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⚡ AI Lessons
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
2w ago
Harness Debt
Harness Debt I sat down to read our CLAUDE.md end to end last month, the first time I had...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
2w ago
I think this is a conversation the field needs to have. This is my first proposal - not as inflexible paradigm, but as a first attempt to move this conversation forward. I would love to hear any feedback you have!
The Harness Stack ...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
2w ago
The Harness Stack
Ask five developers what an "agent harness" is and you will get five different answers. Some mean the...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
When Vibe Coding Stops Working
Vibe coding is real, useful, and produces working software. It is also, past a certain point, a way...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
Code Review When Half the Diffs Are From Agents
Code review was invented for a world in which a human wrote each diff, slowly, and another human read...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
The Pull Request as Checkpoint
The pull request has always been the place where every concern about a change converges. Tests run....
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
Stop Upgrading the Model. Start Engineering the Harness.
When a team hits a ceiling with their coding agent, the first instinct is to reach for a better...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
A Test Pyramid That Earns Its Confidence
Most test pyramids are aspirational. People draw the triangle, point at "many unit tests, fewer...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
AGENTS.md is Not a Junk Drawer
A rules file starts as one page. Six months later it is fourteen pages and nobody can remember what...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
Hexagonal Architecture in Practice: Ports, Adapters, and Tests That Skip the Database
This is the technical companion to a piece I wrote about cutting our CI from ~20 minutes to ~5. That...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
How Hexagonal Architecture Cut My CI Time From 20 Minutes to 5
For most of the past year, our CI was a 20-minute ceremony. Push a branch, walk away, come back to...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
⚡ AI Lesson
3w ago
Feature Flags That Forgot to Leave
A feature flag goes into the codebase to make a rollout safer. The new behavior lives behind the...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
3w ago
The Minimum Viable Test Suite for Working with Agents
The advice "you need more tests" is correct in roughly the same way "you should eat better" is...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
4w ago
Sensors and Guides: Two Ways Your Harness Talks to Your Agent
Birgitta Böckeler, writing about harness engineering at Thoughtworks, draws a distinction that turns...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
4w ago
Don't Make the Agent Re-Run the Test Suite to Find the Failure
Here is a small failure mode that cost me time for longer than it should have. The agent would run...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
1mo ago
The Five-Thousand-Line File
Every team has one. Sometimes it is called utils.ts or helpers.py. Sometimes it has the name of a...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
🤖 AI Agents & Automation
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
The Harness Flywheel: How Reviews Become Rules
The most expensive failure mode in an agent-augmented team is not the agent making mistakes. It is...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
🔧 Backend Engineering
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
When the Docs Lie
There is one thing worse than a codebase with no documentation: a codebase with documentation that...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
🤖 AI Agents & Automation
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
Why AI Agents Love Boring Code
The most useful thing you can do for your coding agent is not a better prompt or a smarter model....
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
The Code Nobody Will Delete
At the bottom of every long-lived codebase is a function nobody has called in three years. Above it...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
Post-mortems and RCAs: why you should be doing them
The hard part of incidents isn't surviving them. It's making them count. Most teams handle the acute...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
1mo ago
Continuous Delivery and Agents
There's a moment in every team's adoption of coding agents where the question shifts from "can it...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
📋 Product Management
⚡ AI Lesson
1mo ago
Custom behavior without custom code
Every successful SaaS product eventually meets the same question: a customer asks for something...
Dev.to · Ian Johnson
1mo ago
Why I prefer docker + make
A development environment is one of those things you don't notice until it goes wrong, and then you...
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