Dave

30+ yr software builder & consultant | Reflections on real engineering, AI productivity, and shipping stuff since the '90s | New writing →

[Dave @DRCordner]

@mrmikeMTL Buckfast tonic wine - if you know, you know

[Dave @DRCordner]

@burkov @DaneJetsons Groups are big in Europe, useful too at a local community level. National level tends to be shite

[Dave @DRCordner]

Loving watching Astra on my laptop sort out an eBay listing issue view cahtbot with eBays AI assistant.
They are so polite and patient!
Agent to Agent is the future! It's entertainment and productivity in one shot!

[Dave @DRCordner]

@DarrenJSmith sounds like my story too!

and I'm off to Bali this winter

[Dave @DRCordner]

Is anyone else noticing a Deterioration of Claude's overall performance recently? Four months ago it felt like I could do anything with Claude. Now I'm struggling to do anything.

[Dave @DRCordner]

@bryan_johnson Vipassana

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand

From the outside it looks like confidence.

Internally it is closer to a quiet decision, repeated over and over again, to hold a line you cannot yet justify.

The steady hand is not a natural state. It is something you provide - often before you fully have it yourself.

Full piece here → https://t.co/yKpLqn80e4

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand

Was it fake?

No.

It was not certainty either. I could not prove what I was saying yet. I was carrying something forward that did not have evidence behind it. Not a performance. A commitment.

Full piece here → https://t.co/52BMGh2BJx

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand

I took a few of my senior people out for lunch. I told them we had been building a ship. We had tested it close to shore. Now it was time to take it into open water. There would be storms. Real ones. But the point was not safety. It was the voyage itself.

Full piece here → https://t.co/yKpLqn80e4

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand

I had been struggling. I knew exactly how much of it I carried alone. But I had done it with enough conviction that it had not been visible, even in hindsight.

There was no version of me sitting backstage, holding the truth and waiting for the performance to end. The performance was the only place the truth could exist. The doubt had nowhere else to go.

Full piece here → https://t.co/yKpLqn80e4

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand

Someone said something to me recently that stayed with me. He had just spent thirty thousand dollars on a consultancy to open his sales pipeline. It hadn’t worked.

He had no idea how much I had struggled when I was building. That landed strangely.

Full piece here → https://t.co/yKpLqn7sow

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

If I opened my project's CLAUDE md right now I would be looking for one specific thing.

The app holds real financial and family data. I would want to see something about security and confidentiality.

I do not know whether it is there. I stopped tracking it.

That not-knowing is the thing worth paying attention to.

Full piece here → https://t.co/5ABRX2txP4

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

I have spent thirty years watching teams develop a particular failure mode.

Responsibility becomes distributed. Everyone assumes someone else is reading the important file. Nobody is.

I work alone now. I did not expect to find the same pattern.

The mechanism does not care how many people are involved.

Full piece here → https://t.co/5ABRX2txP4

#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

@Jason I'm in

[Dave @DRCordner]

Started my first business in 2001, right in the middle of the dot-com crash.
It didn’t feel brave at the time. Just felt like time to stop making money for someone else.
Most of the big moves across thirty years have felt more like that than any heroic leap.
Full story: https://t.co/noKdQzTKIe
#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

New from The Steady Hand: What 30 years actually teaches you.
There's a version of this I could write where I list the lessons. Cash flow is oxygen. Services are your best R&D lab. All true. All hard-won. All missing the point.
What 30 years actually teaches you isn't a list. It carves grooves.
Full piece here → https://t.co/noKdQzTcSG
#TheSteadyHand

[Dave @DRCordner]

The brief is the product.

Conversation is for thinking. The file is for doing. Claude Code is the delivery team. Claude Chat is the solutions architect. My role isn't product owner — it's all of them at once, depending on what the session needs.

Full piece:

https://t.co/6rYKV8EWBx

#TheSteadyHand (5/5)

[Dave @DRCordner]

I asked Claude whether the structured files actually help it, or whether it's just a discipline that helps me.

The honest answer: probably both. But the discipline of writing a proper brief resolves ambiguity before it becomes a bug. That would have been true with a human contractor too.

The AI is almost incidental to that insight.

#TheSteadyHand (4/5)

[Dave @DRCordner]

Prompt 4 was roughly a page. Context pointers, a task description, some tests.

Prompt 32, six weeks later, ran to several pages. State management patterns. Mobile keyboard handling. A twelve-point verification checklist. I didn't write most of it.

Early prompts are specs you write. Later prompts are briefs the system produces.

#TheSteadyHand (3/5)

[Dave @DRCordner]

I used to paste prompts into a fresh Claude session every time I started a dev session.

It worked for the first week. Then the project grew. Quality quietly slipped. Context became hard to track. Minor bugs in almost every session.

One small change fixed all of it. Took me six weeks to notice what had actually shifted.

#TheSteadyHand (1/5)