stephencollins.techI Built a CLI to Find the Riskiest Code in Any Repo — Introducing HotspotsEvery team has those files. The ones everyone knows are dangerous. The ones where a "simple" change takes three days of careful testing. The ones that keep showing up in postmortems. I spent a long ti1d ago·5 min read
stephencollins.techMerkle Trees in SQLite with Python: A Practical TutorialMerkle trees are one of those concepts that quietly power some of the most important technologies we use today—Git, blockchains, and peer-to-peer systems like IPFS. They provide a compact way to prove that a piece of data belongs to a larger dataset,...Sep 22, 2025·8 min read
stephencollins.techThe Technical Challenges I've Faced in Interviews (and Given as an Interviewer)I've been on both sides of the technical interview table. Sometimes I'm the one sweating through a coding challenge, other times I'm the one deciding how to evaluate a candidate. Along the way, I've seen a few clear patterns in what works (and what d...Sep 13, 2025·4 min read
stephencollins.techHow to Use PydanticAI for Multimodal LLMsLarge multimodal models like Google Gemma 3 and Claude Opus 4 can now reason over text and images. But if you've looked at the docs, it's easy to get lost in agents, tools, and structured outputs before you even get to "Hello, World." This post is th...Aug 26, 2025·3 min read
stephencollins.techintent-kit v0.4.0: Lessons in Reliable, Testable LLM Workflow Engineeringintent-kit v0.4.0: Key Concepts and Lessons from This Release The latest intent-kit release (v0.4.0) is a good opportunity to highlight a few patterns and practices that make LLM-driven systems more robust and maintainable. Here’s a look at the most ...Jul 25, 2025·3 min read