Tooling on Advancing Engineering

Justfiles Are a Joy to Use

Tue, 12 May 2026 13:08:46 +0100

Every project eventually grows its own mythology. “How do you run the tests?” becomes a question answered with a message, a README with outdated instructions, or — if you’re truly cursed — a tribal elder who just left the company.

just ends this. It’s a command runner that stores your project’s commands in a justfile, right next to your code, where they belong.

The Anti-Pattern: One Language Inside Another

Fri, 08 May 2026 10:54:36 +0100

Placing one language inside another is one of those anti-patterns that seems harmless until you’re trying to lint it, test it, or ask an LLM to reason about it. The moment you embed a language inside a string in another language, its entire toolchain disappears.

We contain multitudes. Our code should be singular, not polyglot.

The Standards Skill: Applying Engineering Standards with AI

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Encoding engineering standards as an AI skill means they get applied consistently, automatically, and can be measured against.

Pre-commit Hooks: Enforcing Quality at the Source

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-commit hooks catch issues before they reach CI — shifting quality checks as far left as possible.

In an AI-assisted workflow this matters more than ever. LLM-generated commits are faster and more numerous; human review bandwidth is the same. Pre-commit hooks are how you define “done” in a form the machine can check — and the LLM can iterate on.