3 posts tagged with "developer-experience"

The first time I set an agent loose on a real codebase, it ran out of context before it had done anything useful. That's a clarifying experience.

The repository wasn't exotic — a Python monorepo with shared libraries and some infrastructure code. I drew a diagram to understand what was happening. A rectangle for the full context window; blocks for what was already consumed just from loading the codebase: directory tree, CLAUDE.md, relevant modules, config, dependencies. The bar was more than half full before the agent had read a single line of task context or seen a single error message.

Project setup should be boring. Not in a "this is beneath me" way — in a "this takes thirty seconds and I never think about it" way.

Most of the time, it isn't.

I first wrote this post in 2020 after spending several weeks containerising a legacy application I hadn't built and didn't fully understand. The experience was mostly archaeology — reading old config files, tracing hardcoded paths, figuring out what half a dozen processes actually did before touching anything. By the time I had a working Docker image, I'd earned it.

I'm updating it now because the journey has changed, and I think it's worth being honest about how.