I've been seeing some, uh, shall we say, *misguided* decision making on the part of some in the industry who decide, for whatever reason, to put an LLM behind an MCP server. I discuss the reasons why this is a bad idea, and what to do instead, in my latest post. www.spletzer.com/2026/07/dont...

AI coding tools have gotten remarkably good at a great many things. Producing tidy Markdown is not one of them. My latest post covers how I tame it: a linter as the source of truth, semantic line breaks, and teaching the agent to clean up after itself. www.spletzer.com/2026/07/the-...

"Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel" — "Roadhouse Blues" by The Doors I can think of no better advice when it comes to vibe coding, and I don't mean the throwaway kind; I mean the serious kind with real rigor and engineering practices around it. www.spletzer.com/2026/06/its-...

ccccccgkgdkvvvjvfblbbdihehndrvjkutduvftrgubfc If you're working at any organization that uses YubiKeys, we've all seen something like this emitted accidentally in a channel somewhere. In my latest post I illustrate how to disable this! www.spletzer.com/2026/04/how-...

I've owed this post to some security friends of mine for a while. I've been really into GPG commit signing with a YubiKey for many years, and I finally delivered on my promise to write an in-depth guide about it. www.spletzer.com/2026/04/a-no...

Humans make mistakes, and not only can we learn from them, but we can learn how to put AI agents to work in ways that prevent them from making the same mistakes as we would. In my latest post I delve into a mistake I made when I accidentally dropped a database. www.spletzer.com/2026/04/the-...

When things get cheaper, in many scenarios we often use more of them, not less. A Victorian era economist figured this out about coal in 1865, the cloud proved him right again, and I (and others) think AI is next. www.spletzer.com/2026/03/jevo...

I wrote a follow-up to my post on information diet, and this time I got specific. I use RSS with Feedbin and NetNewsWire, subscribe to about 125 feeds, and don't have any social media apps on my phone, giving me more time for writing, thinking, and building. www.spletzer.com/2026/03/cura...

I opened a fresh Claude Code session, typed one prompt, and 40% of my context window was already gone. I call this "dead context," and if you're running AI coding tools, you probably have the same problem without realizing it. www.spletzer.com/2026/03/shed...

In 2024 setting up Python needed pyenv, pip, pipx, shell init scripts, and pain on Windows. In 2026 it needs one tool: uv. Same commands on every OS, 10-100x faster installs, and way simpler. A new no-nonsense guide to setting up Python environments: www.spletzer.com/2026/03/a-ne...

A Tale of Acceleration and Compound Engineering www.spletzer.com/2026/02/a-ta...

Software has always felt like sculpture to me: you start with a block of possibility and chip away until the shape reveals itself. AI coding tools are the fastest chisels (and the best shop assistants) I’ve ever had—but they don’t replace taste. They amplify it. www.spletzer.com/2026/02/the-...

Skeletons are in your closets. Bats will fly out of your caves. The question is whether you let them out now, or wait until your competitors do it themselves and find the hidden treasure on the other side before you do. www.spletzer.com/2026/02/fear...

I spent a little bit of time with Claude Code this weekend and refactored something that had been on my backlog for a long time: my website. www.spletzer.com/2026/02/one-...

The laziest strategy in fast food may be the smartest strategy in AI. In my latest post, I spend 1,500 words on a burger metaphor that probably could've been a tweet. www.spletzer.com/2026/02/mcdo...

Well this is a ChatGPT first for me.

New Blog Post: Tidying Your Home for Your AI Guests www.spletzer.com/2026/01/tidy...

It was my absolute pleasure to be a guest on The PowerShell Podcast, where I had a great conversation with the illustrious Andrew Pla. Get it wherever podcasts are sold! YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryZ7... Podbean (or grab it in your favorite podcast app): powershellpodcast.podbean.com

PowerShell to Distinguished Engineer with Ryan Spletzer. The PowerShell Podcast E208

YouTube video by PDQ

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It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

Is it safe to write a blog post that isn’t about AI? In this slightly humorous and irreverent reflection, I look at AI hype, technological amnesia, and why we keep pretending the rest of technology doesn’t exist. (No agents were harmed in the writing of this.) www.spletzer.com/2025/12/is-i...

Finally, someone wrote it down in a book: To understand what is going well/poorly inside your engineering org: ask the devs what this is! Talk to a bunch of them to get a good picture From the excellent new book by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda called "Frictionless" Arrived yesterday

MCP pushed me back into looking at OAuth extension specs, and I found myself in a spider web of browser tabsm so I decided to make a Mermaid graph diagram in a GitHub repo to visualize the specs and their reference relationships.

We’re living in the age of "vibe coding"—where it’s easier than ever to generate something that looks real. But just because Pinocchio can sing and dance doesn’t mean he’s a real boy... www.spletzer.com/2025/09/pino...

I wrote a post about applying CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) principles to AI agents. www.spletzer.com/2025/08/ask-...

I wrote a blog post to try to disambiguate what MCP can and can't do, and what it is and is not. www.spletzer.com/2025/08/mcp-...

If you haven't had a chance to watch this Pragmatic Engineer interview with Gergely Orosz and Laura Tacho, I highly highly highly recommend it. So many pull quotes from this discussion that resonated with me, thinking "Yes! Finally! Someone is saying it!" 🙂 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHHl...

Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho

YouTube video by The Pragmatic Engineer

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I wrote a post about your information diet in the age of AI. www.spletzer.com/2025/07/your...

It is spelled: Copilot. Not CoPilot. Not Co-pilot. Not Co-Pilot. Copilot. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. 🙃

Wow. “These changes are meant to address what Microsoft sees as lagging internal adoption of its Copilot AI services, according to another two people with knowledge of the plans.” It sounds like some of the lack of adoption is people using competitor’s tools.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · last yr.

Microsoft is asking managers to consider usage of AI tools in performance reviews and is considering formal metrics around AI tool usage. I don’t think usage of any tool, no matter how useful, has ever been a requirement to get a good performance review during my career. This is weird.

I wrote about the hidden complexities of running Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers locally vs remotely, and why deployment context shapes everything from auth to architecture. 👉 www.spletzer.com/2025/05/the-...