Practical guidance for people who use AI seriously.
Better questions produce better results. This site is built around that idea. Not prompt tricks, not hype, not benchmarks. Structured thinking, real workflows, and field-tested lessons from someone who uses these tools under load every day.
The Guides are the lessons. The Field Notes are the stories of how I learned them.
- Charles Edmonds
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Subscribe to Ask Good QuestionsRecent Guides
See allAI Didn’t Create the Architectural Problem. It Exposed It.
When an AI makes a bad programming decision, the obvious conclusion is that the AI made a mistake.
Sometimes that's exactly what happened.
It misunderstood the requirement.
It didn't inspect enough code.
It invented something that wasn't there.
It found a quick local solution instead of th…
Mostly Guidelines
There is a line from Pirates of the Caribbean that keeps coming to mind when I work with AI lately.
Mostly guidelines.
That increasingly seems to describe what happens when we give an AI a large collection of programming rules.
We tell it which part of the application owns a particular respo…
Design From the Outside In
Most software developers are used to starting somewhere near the inside.
We think about the data we're going to need. We think about fields. We think about features. We think about screens. We think about what the program might need to know and all the things somebody might eventually want it to d…
Recent Field Notes
See allThe Wrong Fix Was the Right Warning
One of the things I like about working with AI is that sometimes the mistake is more useful than the successful result.
That doesn't mean I particularly enjoy the mistake when it happens.
Usually my first reaction is something closer to:
Why in the world did you do that?
But every once in a…
The Rule Was Already There
I've had an uncomfortable realization while working on several software projects recently.
The rule was already there.
Not implied. Not buried in some conversation six months ago. Not something I thought I had told the AI but hadn't.
It was there.
We had documented it. We had discussed it. I…
Where Does That Field Show Up?
I've been asking a surprisingly useful question while we're building a new product:
Where does that field show up?
It came out of a change we made in the way we were designing the product.
We'd already built an early proof of concept.
It worked.
It wasn't particularly ugly.
But the m…
I'm working on Real Programmers Use AI, a practical book for developers who want to use AI without losing control of their work. The guides and field notes here are drawn from the same material.