@steve555

AI Agents Can Pass Tests. They Still Can't Maintain Systems.

Mar 12 · 5 min read · 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 as

AI Made Code Cheap. The Bottleneck Is Now Understanding Systems.

Mar 9 · 6 min read · 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 abo

I Built a CLI to Find the Riskiest Code in Any Repo — Introducing Hotspots

Mar 3 · 5 min read · Every 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 ti

Merkle Trees in SQLite with Python: A Practical Tutorial

Sep 22, 2025 · 8 min read · Merkle 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,...

The Technical Challenges I've Faced in Interviews (and Given as an Interviewer)

Sep 13, 2025 · 4 min read · 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...