Joshua McDonaldAug 26, 2026Everything Says Urgent, So Stop Sorting on ArrivalThe research on why the loud task wins, the prompt that scores importance without seeing the urgency markers, and what to do about the…
Joshua McDonaldAug 25, 2026A Third of Feedback Makes Performance WorseKluger and DeNisi found feedback backfiring in 38 percent of cases. The failures have two things in common: no specific action and distance…
Joshua McDonaldAug 13, 2026AI Made Writing Code Nearly Free. Reviewing It Got 91 Percent Slower.Two and a half years of AI coding, as told by the industry’s own numbers, biases included
Joshua McDonaldAug 6, 2026The cost of changing your mind depends on two things: how fast feedback arrives, and how much got…Two cases, three shaky sources, and the two things that actually decide the cost of changing your mind
Joshua McDonaldJul 21, 2026What “Open Weight” Actually MeansA plain explanation of the version of AI you can download, keep, and run without asking anyone.
Joshua McDonaldJul 16, 2026Ask Your Dashboard What It Reads When Nothing ChangedWork metrics move when you do work. Impact metrics move when the work mattered. AI made the first kind free to move, and most dashboards…
Joshua McDonaldJul 9, 2026I Built a Prompt Compressor. The Most Useful Thing It Found Was NothingWe’ve always compressed data to save time and money. What’s new isn’t the instinct. It’s that the codec is now a language model. That arc…
Joshua McDonaldJul 7, 2026Let the Expensive Model Write the InstructionsI build dcaudiotours.com, a set of self-guided walking tours for Washington DC. Thirteen themed tours, eight neighborhood walks, each one a…
Joshua McDonaldJul 2, 2026Who Reviews the Reasoning?The code coming out of agents runs, and the reviewers shipping today catch the bugs. Nobody is reviewing the decision: was this the right…
Joshua McDonaldJun 18, 2026The Preflight Check for Distributed SystemsThe failure modes that take systems down, and where to look for each one
Joshua McDonaldJun 16, 2026What 10²⁶ Actually MeansThe number that defines a “frontier model” in US and California law, in terms of time, hardware, money, and the handful of training runs…
Joshua McDonaldJun 11, 2026Claude Skipped Idempotency Because I Never Asked. So I Made Asking Unnecessary.The code broke on a retry I never mentioned, and even when I ask for the fix, the first version is usually the wrong shape. The answer was…
Joshua McDonaldJun 4, 2026robots.txt Told Crawlers Where to Stop. llms.txt Tells Agents Where to GoWhat the file does, how to write one, and why retrieval is the part that actually matters.
Joshua McDonaldJun 1, 2026What a Jar of Peanut Butter Teaches About Agent Skill SecurityA jar of peanut butter passes through a dozen hands before it reaches your toast, and you trust every one of them without thinking about…
Joshua McDonaldMay 27, 2026What an Agent Skill Is, and How to Write OneIf you use an AI assistant for the same kind of task more than a few times, you have probably noticed the tax. Every session starts cold…
Joshua McDonaldMay 25, 2026EARS, Fifteen Years On: The Requirements Format Built for the Agent EraIn 2009, Alistair Mavin sat with the airworthiness regulations for a Rolls-Royce jet engine control system and found something quietly…
Joshua McDonaldApr 23, 2026I Used AI to Audit 7,200 Hospital Price Files. It Found Something the Code Missed.The story of a real data quality bug, how it got caught, and what it means for data engineering.
Joshua McDonaldApr 16, 2026A Spring Break Commute, Five Dollars, and the State of Multilingual Text-to-SpeechMost people’s mental model of AI stops at the chat window. Type a question, get an answer, move on. That framing made sense in 2023 when a…
Joshua McDonaldApr 13, 2026You Don’t Have to Write Code to Need a CLAUDE.mdSetting Up Claude’s Memory for Writers, PMs, Researchers, and Everyone Else
Joshua McDonaldMar 31, 2026Building a Local AI Coding Assistant: VS Code + Ollama + Small Language ModelsWhy Build This (And Why You Probably Shouldn’t)
Joshua McDonaldMar 26, 2026Nudge Theory Revisited: Writing Tickets for Humans and MachinesUsing ideas from behavioral economics to improve ticket writing, especially now that large language models are reading your tickets as…
Joshua McDonaldMar 23, 2026Your Team Doesn’t Need Well-Rounded Engineers. It Needs a Well-Rounded Team.Most engineering managers follow a familiar routine during performance reviews. You meet with a team member, recognize some things they do…
Joshua McDonaldMar 17, 2026I Built a DC Transit Companion with AI on My Commute using my iPhone. Here’s what I learned.I built a DC Metro companion app called “What’s Up Metro DC” in nine days, using only my iPhone during my commute from Shady Grove to…
Joshua McDonaldMar 4, 2026When Every Engineer Is a ManagerEvery new engineering manager experiences what I call The Backseat Driver moment. You know the feeling: someone else is driving, and you…
Joshua McDonaldMar 2, 2026n(n−1)/2Why Your Team Is Drowning in Conversation and How Math Explains Everything
Joshua McDonaldFeb 26, 2026If Your Career Were a Product, Would Anyone Invest?Most people never use 1:1 meetings, running documentation, and a skills matrix until it’s too late.
Joshua McDonaldFeb 11, 2026What a 15th-century lawsuit and a lead letter ‘A’ can teach us about the age of AIThe revolution of the 15th century wasn’t defined by the scent of old paper or libraries. Instead, it was shaped by the strong, industrial…
Joshua McDonaldJan 19, 2026What the Longest Escalator in the Western Hemisphere Teaches Us About AIIf you live in the DC area, you know about the Wheaton Metro station. It’s home to the longest single-span escalator in the Western…
Joshua McDonaldJan 18, 2026Why Your AI Sounds Like a Corporate HR Department (And How to Fix It)Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, THE ART OF WHISPERING TO MACHINES, available now on Amazon.
Joshua McDonaldJan 17, 2026Why Your AI Feels Slow: The “Baggage Claim” Theory of LatencyWhen Houston Airport first opened, executives faced a big problem. Passengers were upset about how long they had to wait for their bags…
Joshua McDonaldJan 16, 2026Why AI Forgot Your Name: The “Vanishing Whiteboard” TheoryAI doesn’t have a brain. It has a sliding window. Here is how to stop it from losing your data.
Joshua McDonaldJan 16, 2026How to Stop AI Hallucinations by Teaching It to Say “I Don’t Know”Your AI isn’t lying to deceive you. It’s lying to please you. Here is the engineering fix.
Joshua McDonaldJan 15, 2026Why Most AI Models Can't Count the Letter "R" in StrawberryA non-technical guide to Tokenization: why AI fails at simple math and spelling.
Joshua McDonaldNov 20, 2025What a trip to the supermarket can teach you about writing security tickets that engineers actually…This is a story about connecting threads and combining ideas from different experiences, as much as it is about engineering, security, or…
Joshua McDonaldApr 25, 2021Three things to avoid and three things to do to foster open communication in teamsPerhaps the most important thing you can learn to be both a more effective team member and leader is to learn the art of asking questions…
Joshua McDonaldAug 3, 2020Money can’t buy loyalty — intrinsic and extrinsic motivationThere are two two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It’s something you do for the love…
Joshua McDonaldJun 29, 2020Laid Off — What to Do When You Don’t Know What to DoPractical tips for anyone looking for work
