Synthesis Coding
21 articlesThe Part of Your Job AI Can't Do (And Why It Matters More Now)
There's a lot of anxiety about AI making engineering skills obsolete. But the most valuable part of what you do was never the typing. The judgment, the …
When Two Frameworks Point the Same Direction
LangChain published Agent Engineering on December 9. I'd been developing Synthesis Engineering since early November. We arrived at remarkably similar …
RAG Architecture Lessons from Practice
Building a retrieval-augmented generation system revealed patterns the tutorials don't cover. Contractions break search. Not everything needs an LLM. Full …
Data Format Contracts for AI Pipelines
When tools interact, implicit assumptions break silently. Explicit data format contracts prevent the debugging sessions you don't have time for.
Context Loss and How to Prevent It
Why AI assistants forget what you told them, and practical strategies to prevent it. The difference between context that survives and context that gets lost.
The Foundation-First Pattern
Why the most effective AI-assisted projects start with humans writing code by hand. The counterintuitive pattern that makes everything else work.
What is Synthesis Engineering?
Synthesis engineering is a professional discipline for human-AI collaboration on complex work. Not just better prompting — a systematic approach with princ...
How Claude's Memory Actually Works (And Why CLAUDE.md Matters)
Understanding Claude's context architecture changes how you work with it. The tradeoffs between automatic continuity and on-demand depth explain why persistent …
What OpenAI's Sora Build Teaches Us About Synthesis Coding
Four engineers shipped a #1 Play Store app in 28 days using AI agents. Their approach validates the patterns I've been writing about — and adds new ones worth …
Scaling Synthesis Coding in Your Organization
A practical guide for CTOs and engineering leaders: cost analysis, team rollout strategy, training curriculum, and metrics for adopting synthesis coding at s...
Building ownwords: A Synthesis Coding Case Study
What separates synthesis coding from vibe coding isn''t the tools — it''s the decisions. This technical case study walks through the architectural choices,...
Why Synthesis Coding Still Writes Code in the Age of LLMs
The answer is not "just let the model do it" — and code matters more, not less, as AI gets dramatically better Last spring, my son Fitz and I had an aftern...
Vibe Coding and Synthesis Coding: Two Complementary Approaches
Why the conversation isn''t about which approach is better — it''s about knowing when to use each This blog post is for software engineers, engineering lea...
Polyrepo Synthesis: Synthesis Coding Across Multiple Repositories with Claude Code in Visual Studio Code
I wrote this blog post for software engineers, architects, and technical leads. It is code-heavy and implementation-focused. This weekend I was working acr...
Seventeen years ago, I built a tool for the open Web. This weekend, I modernized it using Synthesis Coding with Claude Code AI
In 2008, I released a WordPress plugin called Blogroll Links. The plugin displayed lists of links on WordPress pages using a shortcode. But the idea behind...
Synthesis Coding with Claude Code: Technical Implementation and Workflows
A hands-on guide to practicing synthesis coding (a.k.a. synthesis engineering) with concrete examples, real workflows, and lessons from production systems ...
The Synthesis Engineering Framework: How Organizations Build Production Software with AI
From individual practice to organizational capability: a systematic approach to human-AI collaboration in professional software development This blog post ...
Synthesis Engineering: The Professional Practice Emerging in AI-Assisted Development
Why the most effective engineering organizations are developing systematic approaches that go beyond vibe coding — and why this practice needs a name This ...
The Future of Engineering Services: Building and Measuring Human-AI Teams
The client's request seemed impossible: "We need to modernize our entire legacy system, build two new products, and cut our engineering spend by 20%—all w...
The CTO and chief product officer in the Age of Generative AI: A New Playbook for Technology Leadership
Last week, I watched an AI agent debug a production issue, write a fix, create comprehensive tests, and deploy the solution—all while the product and tech ...
Facilitating Team Communication by AI Prompting Humans! Introducing Daily Team Sync
In the ever-evolving landscape of remote work, maintaining team cohesion and productivity can be a challenge. As someone who's led distributed teams across...