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.

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.

Agentic-Engineering on Advancing Engineering

The Anti-Pattern: One Language Inside Another

LLM Permissions: speed *and* safety in Practice

LLM Permissions: speed and safety in Practice