Posts on Advancing Engineering

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SAST tools analyse source code to surface security vulnerabilities before deployment. This empirical analysis shows it decreases CVEs by 8.2%.

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 becomes a question answered with a message, a README with outdated instructions, or — if you’re truly cursed — a tribal elder who just left the company.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.

LLM Wiki: The Knowledge Base That Maintains Itself

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Of course you’ve got document stores. But be honest, how much ongoing love do they all have? Is every one of your onboarding guides on point, and how many of the “current architecture” diagrams show databases that were deprecated before you joined?

LLM Permissions: speed and safety in Practice

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% of LLM permission requests are approved. That number should make you uncomfortable. Not because approving is wrong — most of those approvals are fine — but because a 93% approval rate is a signal that you haven’t designed your permission model. You’ve just been clicking through dialogs.

There’s also the opposite problem: leaving an agent to work autonomously, then coming back to find it paused, waiting for you to confirm that yes, it can grep a file it’s been reading all session. Both failures have the same root cause: permissions set by default, not design.

The question worth sitting with is whether you can move faster and sleep better. The answer is yes, but it requires deliberate thought about what your LLM actually needs to do its job.