I'm Scott Drake. I write software and teach leadership, but what I really do is study complex things and turn those insights into systems anyone can use. This site is where I share past and current work.
Twelve hours. That's how long it took to build a feature that would have been two to three weeks of work six months ago.
Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A report generation system that requires research and analysis spread across multiple LLM calls, plugged into an existing module with es...
The most important skill in AI-assisted development isn't prompting. It's management.
I spent this week building agents, shipping code with agents, and cleaning up after agents. And the pattern that kept showing up had nothing to do with the technology. It was the same pattern I've been teaching i...
I wrapped up two big initiatives this week—moving a set of services from cloud platforms to Linux VPSs, and finally launching this blog. That freed up some mental space to start experimenting with agentic, command-line coding tools.
I spent time with two of them:
- OpenAI’s Codex
- Anthropic’...
If you're a software engineer starting to build with AI, you've probably sat in meetings where people casually throw around terms like "LangChain," "embeddings," or "hugging face." If you've nodded along while mentally cataloging what to research later, you're not alone.
The AI space has its own...
Thinking about GenAI as a speed tool misses where the real leverage shows up. Two things deliver more value than velocity.
- GenAI expands a person's Capability
AI collapses skill boundaries in ways we haven’t seen before.
→ A SQL developer contributes meaningfully in Entity Framework
...
AI isn’t going to replace software developers, it’s going to make the job fun and feasible again.
Early in my career, I could build useful products and solutions with five technologies. Today it’s 15-20+.
I could become an expert on those core five things. I could feel like a craftsman who m...
