Skill or plugin? Choosing how to package what Claude should know
Skills hold know-how; plugins distribute it. A developer's guide to choosing between a personal skill, a repo commit and a plugin in Claude Code.
Writing
Writing
Essays on engineering leadership, systems, and liberty.
Technology
Build a Claude Code plugin, step by step
A hands-on tutorial: build commit-helper, a Claude Code plugin with a slash command, a review agent and a hook that blocks secrets, then install it.
The Right Fit
Episode 5 of Spending Less on AI. Which model, at what effort, for which kind of software request — endpoints, bugs, refactoring, tests, code review, architecture — and …
The Culture You Can Install
Every AI-first project began with the same explanation of who decides, who builds and who checks. foreman writes it down once and installs it in two steps.
The Cheap Team
Episode 4 of Spending Less on AI. Cutting tokens raised our bill. So we stopped saving tokens and started managing models: the expensive one decides, cheap ones execute. …
The Death of Tokens
Episode 3 of Spending Less on AI. Every tool that promises to cut your AI bill shows you tokens going down. We opened the invoice line by line: tokens fell 46% and the …
A tool to spend less on AI made my bill go up
Episode 2. It saved $439 and about $1,200 came back on another line of the same invoice — and my own rule was blind exactly where the money went.
Headroom: the editor between you and the model
Every request to a coding agent re-sends the whole conversation. Headroom edits it on the way out — what it promises, and the rules of the test.
Hexagonal architecture where it pays: how DOP keeps vendors behind ports
Two adapters per port from day one, one contract suite all of them pass, and a test that breaks the build when the domain imports infrastructure.
GitLab CI for Kubernetes: a blueprint library for many apps and many clusters
A versioned blueprint library, thin app pipelines, and one fleet repository that alone talks to Kubernetes. What survived many apps and clusters.
When is an AI agent's work done?
An agent opens a pull request in twenty minutes; review takes an hour. DOP's answer: no green, no PR — and green must be earned on a commit.
The files that make Claude Code yours
Claude Code is configured by a handful of plain-text files. Know which is which and the tool starts working your way — a short reference with tables.
Liberty
Where there is nothing to steal, there is no theft: the minimal state as a step
Every embezzlement needs a vault. Where the vault shrank — Hong Kong, Georgia, Estonia, Switzerland — theft shrank with it. And where the shortcut was force, the bill …
Who strikes first: the non-aggression principle, from the tax bill to the barracks
Libertarianism in one sentence: no one may initiate force. The rest is applying it — to the tax bill, to the campaign fund, to the draft letter.