AI Agents Can Pass Tests. They Still Can't Maintain Systems.AI coding tools have made writing software dramatically easier. Cursor can scaffold entire modules from a prompt. Claude can produce working CLIs in minutes. Copilot fills in entire implementations asMar 12 · 5 min readstephencollins.tech
AI Made Code Cheap. The Bottleneck Is Now Understanding Systems.This post was originally published on hotspots.dev. Software used to be expensive to produce. Developers were constrained by how fast they could write code, which meant teams had to be deliberate aboMar 9 · 6 min readstephencollins.tech
I 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 tiMar 3 · 5 min readstephencollins.tech
Merkle 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 readstephencollins.tech
The 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 readstephencollins.tech
