Adam Keys

a fluffy black orb like a soot sprite is sitting on a white floor. there’s a small crescent shape of white right in the middle, with a black round spot centered within it. at first glance, it has the appearance of a single eyeball floating in the middle of the void. at second glance, it still looks like that. but maybe on third examination, it’s clearer that the white is from a dog’s little snout, and the black in the middle is the dog’s nose, and any other distinguishing feature like eyes, ears, and paws are absorbed into the black void.

an exceedingly fluffy black dog stands expectantly on the floor and looks up at a little kid in a high chair who presumably has snacks to share. the little bit of white on the dog’s nose and their pink tongue is the only interruption in the otherwise endless sea of darkness. but at least from this angle, they have a more defined body and tiny feet, so she’s a little less “orb” and a little more “dog.”

We only rate dogs. This is the goth cousin of Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. Please understand it's not just a phase, and only send dogs. Thank you… 12/10 (credit u/vincidelaunc)

💤 I love mid-day naps, but they're not always "fit for purpose".

- They don't always fix "energy" problems
- Some naps are amazing, some are just-okay

🔗 therealadam.com/2025/07/25/...

📺 Currently watching: MurderBot, Poker Face, The Bear

therealadam.com/2025/07/02/...

🔗 therealadam.com/2025/07/24/...

🤖 Multitasking with my eccentric pal

1. I teach the agent to build a simple Rails CMS
2. The agent teaches me about LLM evals
3. 🤯 At first, it's like multi-tasking. Later: it's more like delegation and mentoring.

If you find yourself on the "unhappy" side of this equation, try more different/more communication. I'm often surprised how much doing something, anything helps teams get out of this particular funk.

therealadam.com/2025/06/25/...

Communicating early and often: a great, easy hack. Excellent teams do it, troubled teams don't. 🤷‍♂️

To paraphrase: every happy team communicates alike; each unhappy team fails to communicate in its own way.

I bet savvy teams will also invest in tooling, like observability and feature flags, that makes it easier for them to move quickly and recover from failures.

therealadam.com/2025/07/03/...

Essentially, they're trading a bit of time today for better coding agent loops _and_ better legibility for humans in the future.

I think the smartest teams will work on the documentation, automation, and guardrails (linters, type checkers, formatters, etc.) they always wanted but didn't have the time to invest in.

In the short term, coding agents can generate margin for a team. Some will use this to catch their breath, others will use it to storm ahead.

📚Currently reading: LeGuin, Gleick, Herbert, Mod.

therealadam.com/2025/07/14/...

A surprising thing about working with multiple (coding) agents: context engineering is crucial for the agent _and_ the human-in-the-loop.

therealadam.com/2025/07/24/...

I'm contemplating what "beach read" to take on next week on my (non-beach) vacation. _The Power Broker_, on Kindle, is an easy-breezy relaxation read, right? 🙃

Why AI is making us worse thinkers (and how to avoid it) Exploring how AI usage erodes our critical thinking and learning to treat it as a thinking partner for better outcomes.

> we’re generally better off treating AI as a thinking partner rather than a tool we delegate tasks to

👍🏻buttondown.com/untools/arc...

Seems idiomatically Plan 9 to me! 🙃

Many years ago, I had what turned out to be good instincts about the longevity of GitHub and the desire to pay for offline/continuous access to my data:

therealadam.com/2008/12/18/...

Do something new every three years: (formerly?) a policy at The Economist, and a good perspective on life in general.

therealadam.com/2008/12/17/...

Maybe 10x developers were never a thing. We just mistook the ones who were quick at the tedium and toil 🙃

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Fifteen years ago, I broke up with chimichangas. (But it took moving out of Texas to break up with chicken fried steak).

therealadam.com/2010/01/19/...

A diff removing "Arlen, Texas" from an LLM prompt so it doesn't write cover letters in the King of the Hill universe.

At even a passing _mention_ of Arlen, TX, even the smallest of LLMs will jump right into a Hank Hill impersonation.

I’m listening to A Love Supreme on headphones for the first time and I’m having Big Feelings about how Coltrane’s sax is panned hard-left in the stereo mix. (I don't like it, sorry Rudy Van Gelder.)

Most folks are (still) best served by a journal.

therealadam.com/2024/01/07/...

It’s unfortunate, but true, we can’t sensibly integrate all the great productivity tools out there into our workflows.

Systems expansive enough to warrant a course, discussion forum, or orthodoxy may not solve your problem.

therealadam.com/2025/06/29/...

1990s “alt” culture was wild. You could throw an obscure t-shirt on, watch a lesser-known or (future) cult-classic movie, and that was a whole starter personality.

therealadam.com/2025/05/09/...

Slow cover songs, still great.

therealadam.com/2025/03/30/...

Exit Codes Are Having a Moment. LLMs (and agent coding tools in particular) love a fitness function. Give them a tool that indicates success or failure and they'll go to town. Compiler errors, linter warnings—they love that stuff.

therealadam.com/2025/06/17/...

I walk, consider estimates gone sideways, and enjoy things.

buttondown.com/therealadam...

In the collective minds of a team, today’s “this took longer than I’d hoped” can become tomorrow’s “here be dragons” myth.

therealadam.com/2025/04/21/...