Living in Color August · 03
Living in Color W33: What Is a Harness?
August beginner deep dive: what a coding harness is, why the Bingo Board grades them, and how to pick one without drowning in brand names.
4 min read
Section
Writing
Essays and deep dives, mostly on security, voice and agentic AI engineering, and what it actually looks like to move from twelve years in security operations into building real products. No thought leadership, no hype. Just what I've learned and what I'm still figuring out.
Essays
13 essays-
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August Bingo Board · 01
August 2026 Bingo Board: Mid-Month Pulse
Mid-August Board pulse: Qwen3.8-Max, Muse Spark 1.2 / Muse Code, Grok 4.6, and Gemini 3.7 Flash are on the watchlist ungraded. Routing table did not flip.
6 min read -
Living in Color August · 02
Living in Color W32: What Actually Moved
Week of Aug 10: Muse Code as the new harness, SWE-Bench ProMax as the unsaturated refactor yardstick, and Qwen3.8-Max as open-weight Max-class pressure.
4 min read -
Living in Color August · 01
Living in Color W31: What Actually Moved
August kickoff for AI in Living Color: Opus still daily, Sol as coding ceiling, Gemini Flash tiers eating computer-use, open-weight pressure rising, and why harness controls matter more than the logo on the model.
4 min read -
July 2026 Bingo Board Refresh: Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, and What Actually Moved
GPT-5.6 Sol takes the independent SWE-bench Verified lead. Gemini 3.6 Flash jumps computer-use as a cheap Flash tier. Flash-Lite becomes the latency knife. Here is how the Bingo Board moved in July, and what I am actually running.
5 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 06
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 6: The Operating System You Actually Run
The closing part of the series. Vibe coding failure case studies with the receipts. Compliance and governance baseline. The Notion workspace template. Feature spec template and launch checklists. The daily, weekly, and monthly loops that turn agentic engineering from a hobby into a discipline you can sustain.
12 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 05
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 5: Production Architecture, MVP to Real Apps
A six-part guide for the IT/Cyber/Cloud generalist now orchestrating AI agents. Part 5 is the production architecture playbook. The Vercel + GCP split, Expo + React Native for mobile, Supabase + Postgres + Row-Level Security as the non-negotiable, and the five-stage SDLC runbook from ideation to V1 hardening.
10 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 04
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 4: Standing Up the Agentic Engineering Army
A six-part guide for the IT/Cyber/Cloud generalist now orchestrating AI agents. Part 4 is operationalizing the army: six core agent personas, model routing by phase, orchestration framework picks, default tool allowlists, UI standardization rules, and repository + CI/CD discipline.
12 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 03
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 3: The Security Spine for the AI-DLC
A six-part guide for the IT/Cyber/Cloud generalist now orchestrating AI agents. Part 3 is the security spine. We never fixed SSDLC. Now AI-DLC is showing up alongside it. The puzzle pieces are solved, they're just scattered. A mandate is coming. Supply chain, MCP attack surface, secrets in the agentic era, and the anti-hallucination contract.
15 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 02
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 2: The 2026 ADE Stack with Honest Tool Picks
A six-part guide for the IT/Cyber/Cloud generalist now orchestrating AI agents. Part 2: my actual May 2026 stack, the minimum-viable stack if you're starting fresh, and the tools I downgraded or cut. Plus the platform rules and the promotion ladder from Lovable/Replit to Vercel to GCP.
13 min read -
Don't Count Gemini Out Yet
Everyone says Google lost I/O 2026. They're wrong. While the AI Twitter discourse fixated on per-axis benchmark losses, Google quietly consolidated its disparate AI tooling into a single agentic stack, and shipped the receipts.
15 min read -
The Principal Engineer's Agentic Coding Bible · 01
The Principal Engineer's Bible, Part 1: When the IDE Stopped Being an IDE
A six-part guide for the IT/Cyber/Cloud generalist now orchestrating AI agents instead of writing code. Part 1: the moment the mental model broke, why the tool stopped being an IDE, and the discipline that survives. Spec-Driven, Context, and Harness engineering across the new Agentic Development Life Cycle.
16 min read -
From the SOC to the Stack: What 12 Years in Security Operations Taught Me About Building in the Age of AI
A former security operations engineer maps how SOC instincts (threat modeling, least privilege, supply chain paranoia) translate directly into the governance skills that agentic AI development demands.
9 min read