I am Ken. This is my personal web site.

Sometimes I write notes and post photos.

Recent Notes

Pattern pickup in practice

In my post about AI agents as power tools I wrote that agents are good at picking up existing patterns. Here’s a concrete example of what that looks like—both the strengths and the limits.

The setup

I have a project using SQLite with a bespoke database versioning and migration system. Nothing fancy, just a version number stored in the database and a set of migration functions that upgrade from one version to the next. The kind of thing you write when you need migrations but don’t need a framework.

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The agent is not your colleague

In my post about AI agents as power tools I ended with “don’t confuse the tool for the craftsperson.” This is worth expanding, because the confusion runs in both directions and both cause problems.

The mentorship trap

AI agents communicate in natural language. They say “I” and “I think” and “let me try.” They apologize when they make mistakes. This makes it easy to treat them like junior colleagues who work very fast.

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