software by Stafford Williams https://staffordwilliams.com/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:33:01 GMT Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:33:01 GMT Astro Once your agentic code-assist workflow is consistently producing acceptable code the bottleneck to productivity becomes the speed at which you can produce this code. One of the biggest slowdowns is when the tool prompts you - usually for permission to perform some task, and even just a few questions from the tool can severely cap sessions running in parallel. In this post we'll look at refining Claude Code's permissioning approach to reduce the number of questions asked and speed up the workflow. Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/03/08/steering-the-vibe-permissions/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/03/08/steering-the-vibe-permissions/ ai code-assist assist In this post I'll describe an improved method to guide the output of code-assist tools towards more maintainable code. In a previous post, I described a refactor approach where periodically I would command the tool to break down files into smaller modules. However knowing (or remembering) when to run it, and having it based on some arbitrary line count was not ideal. That earlier approach has now been superseded by a complexity-based approach that runs as a part of the normal verify workflow. Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/22/steering-the-vibe-complexity/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/22/steering-the-vibe-complexity/ ai code-assist assist This is the fourth post in a series about steering AI code assist (code-assist) towards producing maintainable code. This particular post will look at a workflow outside the core loop of generating code and gives insight into how the tools we're already using can be leveraged to improve more than just writing code. Specifically this post will explore improved pull request (PR) processes. Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/11/steering-the-vibe-review/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/11/steering-the-vibe-review/ ai code-assist assist The way I deliver software is grounded in a belief that quality matters and is the route to less suffering. After building software for a long time my approach has become tacit knowledge - helpful in work I'm directly involved with but elusive to others, and more recently, AI. I need to write it down but I've been extremely good at allowing the annoying complexity to keep me procrastinating. For every guideline I have, I can think of exceptions and a context where it doesn't apply. But the efficiency of having it written down is now higher than ever - not only can it help me clarify my thinking, and you to understand my approach, but I can use it to build or evaluate AI tooling to help teams deliver software better and faster than ever before. Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/01/quality-and-suffering/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/02/01/quality-and-suffering/ software-delivery ways-of-working quality So the agent and I determined what it needed to do and it built a plan and the plan was split into multiple steps with the intention of progressing one step at a time with the reasoning being I want to use as little of the context window as possible for each step so quality remains high. I had a progress file and it would check off each step as it was done, and I'd clear the context window between steps. This approach revealed some problems: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/01/15/agent-orchestration/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/01/15/agent-orchestration/ ai code-assist agent-orchestration 2025 was the year of agentic AI code assistants and programming will never be the same. For some, these tools have become a critical part of their daily workflow and produce most, if not all, of the code they write. For others, these tools remain experimental and unreliable, producing more frustration than value. Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/01/04/twelve-months-of-agentic/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2026/01/04/twelve-months-of-agentic/ ai code-assist claude-code This is the third post in a series about steering AI code assist (code-assist) towards producing maintainable code. In this post I'll discuss the refactor commands I've added to assist, the CLI tool I'm building to share deterministic patterns across code-assist workflows. Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/29/steering-the-vibe-refactor/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/29/steering-the-vibe-refactor/ ai code-assist assist This blog has been on Jekyll for a decade. Over that time I've extended it with plugins and custom scripts, using liquid and Ruby, and hand-rolling it, prior to AI, locking me further into the ecosystem. I don't install Ruby or Jekyll and instead generate the site using docker containers, however recently those containers started throwing errors specifically in WSL on win11 (no problem on macOS or the linux-based GitHub runners). After failing a number of times to resolve my win11/WSL woes, I cracked it and began the port from Jekyll to Astro. Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/21/porting-jekyll-to-astro-with-claude-code/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/21/porting-jekyll-to-astro-with-claude-code/ ai astro claude-code jekyll This is the second post in a series about tightening the loop and improving the output when programming using AI code assist tools. In the previous post I introduced assist, the CLI I'm building to enforce determinism on the LLM's output. In this post, we'll look at another command in the tool: assist verify Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/14/steering-the-vibe-verify/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/14/steering-the-vibe-verify/ ai code-assist assist This is the first post in a series in which I'll write about tightening the loop and improving the output when programming using ai code assist. This year has seen remarkable improvement in the capabilities of AI code assist tools but often this is missed by users who don't know how to get the best out of them. I hope to share some of my experiences and techniques in this series of posts as I too continue to learn ways to extract value from these emerging tools. Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/07/steering-the-vibe-commits/ https://staffordwilliams.com/blog/2025/12/07/steering-the-vibe-commits/ ai code-assist assist