// AI.CODING.WITH.JUDGMENT

troels.im

Notes from building Compound Coders, shipping products using AI, and turning agent output into verified software. The work lives where prompts meet repo memory, recovery habits, and production evidence.

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Chat with Troels

Prompting, repo memory, product judgment

Bring a messy AI coding session, a product bet, or a repo workflow.
How do I ship this without trusting vibes?
We turn it into context, checks, recovery paths, and a small verified release.
Ask about AI-assisted shipping...send
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// OPERATING.SYSTEM

Modern AI work needs a repo-shaped system.

The training connects five levers: mindset, accurate prompting, context engineering, evaluation and recovery, and agent-oriented repository organization.

01Raise the turn success before chasing speed
Frame tasks with role, context, constraints, output shape, examples, and acceptance criteria.
02Build repo memory
Move product, workflow, engineering, and shipping memory out of chat so agents stop starting from zero.
03Ship through verified loops
Prototype when the shape is unclear, turn evidence into product direction, then build small checked issues.

// LATEST.NOTES

Fresh experiments, essays, and videos.

Short, practical pieces from the edge of AI-assisted software work.

Article

The one piece everyone is getting wrong

The blog post argues that founders should start with distribution before building anything: knowing where to reliably find customers matters more than merely identifying a problem. The author contrasts “scratching your own itch” with serving a market you already understand how to reach, using consultancy as an example of a natural bridge from employment to business ownership. Once consultancy revenue plateaus, the proposed growth path is to serve existing customer segments better by applying the 80/20 rule: identify the small portion of work that creates most of the value, package it into a cheaper, repeatable offering, and use systems, boilerplates, agent-first software, or SaaS to increase capacity. The core strategy is to repeatedly find patterns, systematize the highest-value work, test the new offer with clients, and compound those improvements toward much higher MRR.

Article

A different kind of post

The post announces a shift in the blog’s direction, away from technical tutorials and toward a more personal journal about entrepreneurship, AI-assisted coding, software engineering, and mental wellbeing. After launching FastCoach.io successfully, the author reflects on why they are pursuing solopreneurship despite the stress: freedom. They contrast chosen, growth-oriented stress with unhealthy workplace stress that spills into family life. The post then clarifies the future direction of Wonop as an agents-first company focused on fixing underserved parts of the web, service by service and app by app.

Article

Multi-Agent and Sub-Agent Architectures in Claude

Every "I built X with multi-agent Claude" post I read this year follows the same arc. The author spawns five sub-agents. They run in parallel. The author calls it 5x faster. The implication is that you should also spawn five sub-agents next time you build something.

Article

Compounding judgment in the age of AI brainrot

Last week I watched a senior engineer review a 600-line PR that Claude had generated in twenty minutes. He scrolled past most of it, stopped on one function, paused for maybe four seconds, and said: "This is going to deadlock under load."

Article

Building Purpose-Built Agents for a Single Job

The first thing most engineers do with an agent framework is build an assistant. A general one. They point it at the repo, write a prompt that says something like "help me ship faster," and spend an afternoon being impressed. A week later they have quietly stopped using it. A general assistant is a chat window with extra steps, and you already had a chat window.

Article

AI Economics and Staying Relevant as an Engineer

In March 2023, GPT-4 cost $30 per million input tokens. It was the smartest model you could buy, and if you were wiring it into anything real, you rationed it. You cached aggressively. You trimmed prompts. You thought twice before sending a request.