# ai

Your Agent Doesn't Need a Smarter Model

Picking the right model is the small lever. Picking what the model knows before you ask it anything is the big one. Walks through a lean CLAUDE.md (with a secrets disclosure), what sub-agents actually inherit, shared vs per-agent context layers, and why I ended up organizing agents by area rather than language — plus the Context7 gotcha, the area-drift gotcha, and a colleague's nightly-PR-review experiment that keeps hitting the same wall. Basically: "I'd rather hand a Haiku agent a clean project manifest than run Opus on a diff with no background."

Not Every Question Deserves Your Best Model

Why defaulting to the top-tier model for every prompt is the fastest way to burn through an AI budget, and what deliberate task-to-model routing actually looks like. I walk through the mental model (Haiku for mechanical work, Sonnet for day-to-day coding, Opus for real reasoning), the reverse gotcha that made me upgrade a few of my own agents from Haiku to Sonnet, and a concrete example: a PR review skill that runs a cheap Haiku checklist pass first and only escalates to Sonnet when it finds something worth a closer look. Basically: "Stop sending your commit messages to Opus."

They Said I Couldn't Code Without Autocomplete

My journey from getting teased by senior devs for using autocomplete to running local LLMs on my laptop. It walks through every tool that shifted how I work — Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude — the failures along the way (thousand-line PRs, hallucinated code, things I didn't review properly and broke), and where I think this is all heading. Also: why local models like Qwen running on my M2 Pro are genuinely useful for the boring 40% of the work, even if they still lose to Haiku on anything complex. Basically: "My instinct has always been to use whatever helps me build faster — and AI is just the newest version of that same idea, turned up to eleven."

I Never Wanted to Write a Blog

My first post that isn't about databases. It's the why behind this blog: years of saying no to writing, feeling stuck in my career, imposter syndrome that doesn't shout but never goes away, and what changed when I started using AI as a writing partner. Also a little about who I am — Rails dev since 2012, based in Cartago, Costa Rica, husband and father of two. And why I think fundamentals matter *more* in the AI era, not less. Basically: "I never wanted to write a blog — and here's why I finally did."