92 posts on engineering, architecture, and technical craft.
Same AI, same codebase, same money-critical feature — built two ways. An apples-to-apples walk through 'normal' AI coding versus pro AI-Driven Development on a real billing-reconciliation milestone, with the tests, gates, and numbers that separate hope from proof.
11 min readIn a large codebase the bottleneck isn't how smart Opus is — it's how precisely you point it and how tightly you verify. Six portable moves to steer a fast agent so its speed lands on the right target instead of becoming faster waste.
19 min readYou left the enterprise SDLC — change boards, QA gates, sign-offs — to vibe-code solo with an AI. The safeguards didn't have to follow you, but their jobs did. A field guide mapping each one to its lean ADD equivalent, grounded in two real solo projects.
16 min readA controlled comparison: two AI workflows build the same forty-line function from one spec. GSD records it in five files and 644 lines of prose; ADD in a 22-line contract. Real recovered artifacts and exact token logs show ADD spent 5× fewer tokens with the same passing tests.
14 min readNous Research's Hermes Agent ships a learning loop inside its runtime — act, then a background thread folds lessons into memory and skills. It's the back half of ADD's loop, in code. What that proves, what it's missing, and why the two compose.
10 min readHermes Agent proved an AI agent can run a self-improving loop — but it's bolted to the Hermes runtime. ADD gives you the same compounding loop on Claude Code and Codex, plus the safety gate Hermes lacks. The loop becomes an asset you own, not a feature you rent.
9 min readAI-Driven Development isn't a replacement lifecycle — it re-wires the one you already run. A stage-by-stage field guide mapping ADD onto requirements, design, dev, review, test, security, release, ops, and maintenance — grounded in two real projects.
19 min readA data-driven companion to the ai-proxy field study. Mining the transcripts and the .add foundation to measure an AI-driven build across the full SDLC and every role, against modeled human baselines of 6 person-months to 32 person-years, with the caveats that keep the comparison honest.
27 min readADD and Claude Code's Plan Mode both fix direction before an agent builds — but at different scales. Plan Mode is an in-session, read-only guardrail; ADD is a cross-session, evidence-gated method. Why the question isn't which, but which layer.
14 min readThe five competencies behind AI-Driven Development — Domain, Spec, UI/UX, Test, and AI/Build — and why each is a separate discipline the agent stands on. The foundation that makes 'constrain the what, free the how' actually work.
12 min read