AI on Greg Herlein

What Would Grace Say?

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Grace Hopper built the first compiler in 1952. They said “you can’t make them understand English-like instructions.” She had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. Sound familiar? Grace had some thoughts about this kind of thinking. She had a lot of thoughts, actually.

Builders Build

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

From a certain point of view, there are two kinds of people in the world: builders and not-builders. This isn’t judgment—it’s observation. Some people consume. Others create. Builders can’t help it.

SaaS is Dead, Long Live Platforms

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

AI has made code cheap and abundant. The scarce resource is now knowing what to build, not how. This is creating a rapid split between companies that sell workflows and companies that sell capabilities. Only one of these will survive.

AI-Boosted Building - It's All About Agency

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” When intelligence becomes a utility, the ability to ACT on it becomes everything. In today’s software world, Agency is more important than anything else!

Don't Miss the Train!

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

The AI train has left the station. Some of us are on board, generating entire modules from specs. Others are still on the platform debating whether the train is even real. Four smart people wrote about this shift this past week. They all agree on what it means. And I agree with them.

Automation Is Robotics (And You're Already Building Robots)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

If software changes something in the real world, it’s a robot.

The Three Tiers of Software Development (Where will you land?)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Software development is stratifying into three distinct tiers. Where you land will determine whether you make more money, the same, or far less than today.

2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Looking back at 2025, one theme dominates: AI agentic programming went from novelty to necessity. This year transformed how I think about software development, career advice, and even my personal hardware projects. Here’s what I wrote about, what I learned, and what I expect in 2026.

Programming Languages in 2026

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:03:00 -0800

Popularity, Jobs, LLM Proficiency, Concurrency Complexity, and Deployment Complexity

Five factors now drive language choice: developer adoption, job market demand, LLM code generation quality, concurrency handling, and deployment complexity. Here’s how they intersect.

Coding is Solved (And That's Fine)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

“We are nearly at coder-equivalency for economically useful coding. A sufficiently experienced software engineer can now write >90% of production-ready code purely through prompting.” Yes, exactly.

Putting Claude in Container Jail: My localdev Setup

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

I let Claude Code do whatever it wants without asking permission.

Before you spit out your coffee: I keep it in a jail. A container jail.

Vibe Coding Book Review

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

I don’t like the term “vibe coding.” I strongly prefer “AI-assisted software engineering.” But regardless of what you call it, Gene Kim and Steve Yegge have written a book about it - and their journey from skeptics to true believers is the most interesting part.

Using Claude Code to Build gocat

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:01 -0800

In my previous post about Claude Code, I talked about using VS Code devcontainers to safely run Claude in “dangerous mode.” That was great for a typical software project. But what about something harder? What about porting a complex hardware-interfacing library from Python to Go, where you need to deeply understand USB protocols, radio registers, and firmware internals?

That’s exactly what I did with gocat – a Go library for controlling the YardStick One sub-GHz RF transceiver. And Claude Code was instrumental in making it happen.

From Clicking Yes to Letting Claude Run Wild (Safely)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:01 -0800

So I’ve been working on this project called client-w-mcp – it’s a leanring project to truly understand how an AI agent works with MCP servers. And I’m exploring Agentic development - with Claude Code.

Why Claude Code?

The first time I used it, Claude just… flowed. It seems to do a lot more by itself to figure things out. I especially like the Task() so that it can go do more than one thing at a time. It would be bad to try to modify code that way, but to write tests or update docs and not have to wait doing one thing at a time… is wonderful.

AI Agent Naysayers

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a lot of folks who are in outright denial about AI agentic programming. They are wrong. AND… they are right. My thoughts.

Agent Building: Ollama Hosted Models Token per Second

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0800

There’s no way to really understand something unless you dive into first principles. This is especially true for AI coding agents. What is the editor doing under the hood? I try to peel the onion a bit.

Creating Blog Posts with AI: My Experience with Zed and Claude 3.5

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:45:00 -0700

I’ve been exploring the intersection of AI and content creation lately, and I wanted to share my experience using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 AI assistant within the Zed editor to streamline my blogging workflow.

Advice to New Developers (or, How to Get Hired)

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Reading time: 10 minutes

It’s brutally hard to find a job as a new college grad today. And AI is changing things even for seasoned Engineers. Here’s my advice.

Agentic Programming: The New Robot Revolution!

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:01 -0800

The evolution of AI-assisted programming has reached a pivotal moment, transforming from simple code completion to truly collaborative AI agents. This shift represents not just an improvement in tooling, but a fundamental change in how software is developed.

Book Review: AI at the Edge

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I bought the eBook AI at the Edge. But you can download a free copy from LinkedIn. In short? Don’t waste your money. But for free?

Embrace AI Pairing: The Future is Already Here

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Let’s talk about AI pair programming - not the hypothetical future version, but what we have right now in 2024. I’ve spent the last year working extensively with AI coding assistants, and I have some thoughts to share.