I run workshops, both privately and at community events, large technical conferences, and remotely, on a variety of topics. how to build a coding agent: free workshop😎The following was developed last month and has already been delivered at two conferences. If you would like for me to run a| Geoffrey Huntley
It's an uncertain time for our profession, but one thing is certain—things will change. Drafting used to require a room of engineers, but then CAD came along...| Geoffrey Huntley
This blog post intends to be a definitive guide to context engineering fundamentals from the perspective of an engineer who builds commercial coding assistants and harnesses for a living. Just two weeks ago, I was back over in San Francisco, and there was a big event on Model Context Protocol| Geoffrey Huntley
It's a meme as accurate as time. The problem is that our digital infrastructure depends upon just some random guy in Nebraska. Open-source, by design, is not financially sustainable. Finding reliable, well-defined funding sources is exceptionally challenging. As projects grow in size, many maintainers burn out and find themselves unable| Geoffrey Huntley
It's not that hard to build a coding agent. 300 lines of code running in a loop with LLM tokens. You just keep throwing tokens at the loop, and then you've got yourself an agent.| Geoffrey Huntley
It's another day, and another coding tool has been brought to market that uses ripgrep under the hood. This time it's Kiro by Amazon. What follows below is an analysis of this coding agent: Study the source code in this folder. Your task is to create an extensive writeup about| Geoffrey Huntley
It might surprise some folks, but I'm incredibly cynical when it comes to AI and what is possible; yet I keep an open mind. That said, two weeks ago, when I was in SFO, I discovered another thing that should not be possible. Every time I find out something that| Geoffrey Huntley
If you've seen my socials lately, you might have seen me talking about Ralph and wondering what Ralph is. Ralph is a technique. In its purest form, Ralph is a Bash loop. while :; do cat PROMPT.md | npx --yes @sourcegraph/amp ; done Ralph can replace the majority of outsourcing at| Geoffrey Huntley
| Geoffrey Huntley
So I'm currently over in San Francisco. I've been here for almost two weeks now. I'll be heading home to my family in a couple of days. But over the weekend, I had the opportunity to drop into the Computer History Museum. I'm not gonna lie, being able to spend| Geoffrey Huntley
The Macbook Pro M1 is the software development laptop of choice yet I love my iPad considerably more. I'm all in with my thin client for hipsters. Here’s what I’ve learned over the months and how my baremetal homelab in the sky is setup.| Geoffrey Huntley
Ever wondered what happens if you take the technique at "Can a LLM convert C, to ASM to specs and then to a working Z/80 Speccy tape? Yes." and run it against the Atasslian Command Line (ACLI) interface? Strap yourself in, as the Z80 is amongst one| Geoffrey Huntley
🚧 hello consumers of RSS, if you're reading this, then you're ahead of the curve. These are the slides from my upcoming talk, which will be delivered at Webdirections in a couple of hours. After the talk is available, this post will be updated with the| Geoffrey Huntley
Just yesterday morning, I was writing a conference talk on best practices for maintaining the LLM context window, which was quite detailed. It contained the then best practices from the two blog posts below. autoregressive queens of failureHave you ever had your AI coding assistant suggest something so off-base that| Geoffrey Huntley
Something I've been wondering about for a really long time is, essentially, why do people say AI doesn't work for them? What do they mean when they say that? From which identity are they coming from? Are they coming from the perspective of an engineer with a job title and| Geoffrey Huntley
The IT department never questioned why the new printer arrived in a crate marked with eldritch symbols. They were just happy to finally have a replacement for the ancient LaserJet that had been serving the accounting floor since time immemorial. Sarah from IT support was the first to notice something| Geoffrey Huntley
This is a follow-up from my previous blog post: "deliberate intentional practice". I didn't want to get into the distinction between skilled and unskilled because people take offence to it, but AI is a matter of skill. Someone can be highly experienced as a software engineer in 2024, but that| Geoffrey Huntley
I've been thinking about Overton Windows lately, but not of the political variety. You see, the Overton window can be adapted to model disruptive innovation by framing the acceptance of novel technologies, business models, or ideas within a market or society. So I've been pondering about where, when and how| Geoffrey Huntley
💀 Ugh, merge conflicts: That sinking feeling when Git screams at you? We've all been there. Manually fixing those tangled messes? It's giving... tedious. It's giving... waste of my precious time. 😩 🚀 Enter rizzler: Your new AI bestie that actually *gets* Git. This| Geoffrey Huntley
Have you ever had your AI coding assistant suggest something so off-base that you wonder if it’s trolling you? Welcome to the world of autoregressive failure. LLMs, the brains behind these assistants, are great at predicting the next word—or line of code—based on what's been fed into| Geoffrey Huntley
In a previous post, I shared about "real context window" sizes and "advertised context window sizes" Claude 3.7’s advertised context window is 200k, but I've noticed that the quality of output clips at the 147k-152k mark. Regardless of which agent is used, when clipping occurs, tool call to| Geoffrey Huntley
It’s an old joke in the DJ community about upcoming artists having a bad reputation for pushing the audio signal into the red. Red is bad because it results in the audio signal being clipped and the mix sounding muddy. It’s a good analogy that applies to software| Geoffrey Huntley
Why did I do this? I have no idea, honest, but it now exists. It has been over 10 years since I last had to use the Win32 API, and part of me was slightly curious about how the Win32 interop works with Rust. Anywhoooo, below you'll find the primitives| Geoffrey Huntley
This is a follow-up to Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you’re screwed unless you take action...Two weeks ago a student anonymously emailed me asking for advice. This is the reply and if I was in your shoes this is what I’d do. So, I read your| Geoffrey Huntley
Ello everyone, in the "Yes, Claude Code can decompile itself. Here's the source code" blog post, I teased about a new meta when using Cursor. This post is a follow-up to the post below. You are using Cursor AI incorrectly...I’m hesitant to give this advice away for free,| Geoffrey Huntley
✨Daniel Joyce used the techniques described in this post to port ls to rust via an objdump. You can see the code here: https://github.com/DanielJoyce/ls-rs. Keen, to see more examples - get in contact if you ship something! Damien Guard nerd sniped me and other folks wanted| Geoffrey Huntley
Two weeks ago a student anonymously emailed me asking for advice. This is the reply and if I was in your shoes this is what I'd do. So, I read your blog post "An oh f*** moment in time" alongside "The future belongs to idea guys that can just do| Geoffrey Huntley
These LLMs are shockingly good at deobfuscation, transpilation and structure to structure conversions. I discovered this back around Christmas where I asked an LLM to make me an Haskell audio library by transpiling a rust implementation. An “oh fuck” moment in timeOver the Christmas break I’ve been critically looking| Geoffrey Huntley
What follows is an email that arrived in my inbox moments ago, reproduced in it's entirety. I'll be doing a response letter, after I get some sleep. For now, discuss at https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1888365040572751973 Hi there, So, I read your blog post "An oh f*** moment in| Geoffrey Huntley
At "an oh fuck moment in time", I closed off the post with the following quote. N period on from now, software engineers who haven't adopted or started exploring software assistants, are frankly not gonna make it. Engineering organizations right now are split between employees who have had that "oh| Geoffrey Huntley
There, I said it. I seriously can't see a path forward where the majority of software engineers are doing artisanal hand-crafted commits by as soon as the end of 2026. If you are a software engineer and were considering taking a gap year/holiday this year it would be an| Geoffrey Huntley
🗞️I recently shipped a follow-up blog post to this one; this post remains true. You'll need to know this to be able to drive the N-factor of weeks of co-worker output in hours technique as detailed at https://ghuntley.com/specs I'm hesitant to give this advice away for free,| Geoffrey Huntley
Been doing heaps of thinking about how software is made after https://ghuntley.com/oh-fuck and the current design/UX approach by vendors of software assistants. IDEs, since 1983, have been designed around an experience of a single plane of glass. Restricted by what an engineer can see on their| Geoffrey Huntley
Over the Christmas break, I’ve been critically looking at my own software development loop, learning a new programming language, and re-learning a language I haven’t used professionally in over seven years. It's now 2025. Software assistants are now a core staple of my day-to-day life as a staff| Geoffrey Huntley
Hello there! First, you have made the correct decision to visit Sydney, it's a pretty chill place for tourists. To help you fall even more in love with the city, I have provided you with a list of awesome things to do. coffee Australia has some of the best coffee| Geoffrey Huntley
As hacker summer camp swings into full gear, I reflect upon the time where I was arrested under suspicion of transforming a Hong Kong university mail server into a 0-day warez site and almost spent time in hacker winter camp. I was, fortunately, 13 at the time and last week| Geoffrey Huntley
Here I am, sitting at my favourite pub in Melbourne drinking an expensive pint of craft beer and not really caring that much about the cost that much because so far this month because I've spent a grand total of $0 on rent. I'm half a pint into authoring this| Geoffrey Huntley
Back in 2004, I created a content delivery network and one of the world's first video blogs which peaked as the 1901st most visited website in the world and was interviewed by the Washington Post, and the BBC and was published in various newspapers at a ripe age of 20.| Geoffrey Huntley
Here I am, without my van, on the opposite side of the world, sitting at IHOP in Austin, Texas, and the story of how I ended up here is a strange one. It has now been just over a month since I left Gitpod, a company I thought I would| Geoffrey Huntley
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Now that I'm no longer an employee at Gitpod, I'm finally able to author a blog post freely about something that has been troubling me for quite| Geoffrey Huntley
I was asked recently on the topic of leadership. In short, I’m an avid fan of servant leadership - being selflessly 100% focused on helping folks within my team / being a janitor. What is Servant Leadership? - Greenleaf Center for Servant LeadershipGreenleaf Center for Servant Leadership Back circa 2018,| Geoffrey Huntley
McDonalds in Australia do a decent cup of coffee. It’s not great but it’s consistently decent so I often start my day with a cup. Due to my travels around Australia in a decked out van I have seen how many McDonalds operate and just how many of| Geoffrey Huntley
I'm saddened by the need to author this blog post about a product that I once loved. For the last eight months I've been traveling around Australia in a custom built van with a Denon 4 controller connected to two SOUNDBOKs v3 speakers and life has been pretty freaking good| Geoffrey Huntley
For some, this is the consulting version of Siberia; lost in a hopeless no-man’s land. Without a plan, you'll have very little to do and what you are assigned is often either busy-work or unfulfilling at best. Like a utility player on a sports team, you are sitting in| Geoffrey Huntley
🔎I authored this blog post whilst I was an employee of Gitpod for Gitpod. I no longer work at Gitpod. Earlier last year I added a /new page to my website at https://ghuntley.com/new/ as a productivity shortcut and partly out of necessity of doing software development from| Geoffrey Huntley
🔎I authored this blog post whilst I was an employee of Gitpod for Gitpod. I no longer work at Gitpod. In what seems like a long time ago, in part because it is, I learned the catastrophic capabilities of this command the hard way, and I'm sure folks my vintage| Geoffrey Huntley
Back in 2013, I stumbled upon this blog post by Brendan Forster which fundamentally changed my career trajectory. Knowing that there was a human I could turn to ask questions related to open-source made all the difference. Ever since then I've been setting aside time for coffee catchups with anyone| Geoffrey Huntley
Software in 2022 is overwhelmingly built with little to no consequence and is made up of other components which are overwhelmingly developed by unpaid volunteers on an AS-IS basis that are being financially neglected. Systemically, I'm concerned that there is a lack of professional liability, rigorous industry best practices, and| Geoffrey Huntley
