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March 2026

  • 6 min read

Boss-Fight Coding

Decades of hand-crafting code and we still ended up with Workday and Jira!

For systems development, gen/AI can reduce cognitive load on parts of the process we've always known have the most impact: trackable requirements, falsifiable acceptance criteria, meaningful tests and unemotional adversarial analysis based entirely on facts. If we improve these parts of the process, it doesn't matter who writes the code, quality goes up!

Let's take a beat to think through the reality of system development:

  • Hand-crafted code is often garbage, and the older and bigger it gets, the more true this is. (Human overrated)
  • A spoonful of sewage in a glass of wine is a glass of sewage. (AI overrated)
  • We cannot enter a P1 firefight with an AI that wrote the code — today we need context, situational awareness and understanding! (AI overrated)
  • We built the wrong thing — or we built the thing no one wanted. (Human overrated)

These somewhat contradictory things can all be true because writing code is just one part of what is mostly a messy, mundane business activity.

But we can remedy many of the messy problems if we adapt the banking industry's LoD2 regulatory process for gen/AI-based development — a process I call Boss-Fight Coding.

  • 6 min read

Context Is Everything!

For much of 2025 this was my experience of agentic gen/AI coding:

Start a task, Claude Code takes a while to warm up until it hits a sweet spot where it reliably produces consistent, good work for many turns, and then, blammo!, context collapse. At which point my only options are /clear or /compact. Arg!

Context Collapse

We know from the NoLiMa paper that longer contexts become diffuse which result in the haystack problem: earlier signals that lack lexicographical matching get buried in the mass of tokens. At some point the agent starts to go haywire — often when we're near the context window limit. This is super frustrating because it comes without warning and interrupts flow. Once this happens, I find that /clear is the only workable option. I wanted a better option than to simply start over.

Introducing Context-Curator

https://github.com/0x6a77/context-curator

Context-curator is a set of Claude Code slash commands that allow you to manage context in a task-oriented way. (You can read below how context-curator came to exist.) The general idea is that context, which includes the CLAUDE.md files, really should be task-specific so that Claude Code laser focuses on just what's needed for the task.

Now I can warm up a context and save it as part of a task, and when I encounter context collapse, I just reload the warmed-up context. Or when I return to a task, I get the warmed-up context. (If we reload a context within the cache window, we'll save tokens. This will usually be true for /resume after a collapsed context.)