Optimizing Agentic Development: The Signal Ratio
An agent’s intelligence isn’t a property of the model. It’s a property of the tokens you let through. The conversation about AI coding agents has been stuck on prompts for two years. Better system …
Essays and write-ups. Release notes for each tool are in Release notes; posts grouped by tool are under Projects.
Open source update: six new tools and what changed, September to October 2026
Between 1 September and 25 October 2026, my public repositories at github.com/grahambrooks cut 92 releases across 27 repositories. Most of those numbers are plumbing. This post separates the plumbing …
Reading a change as two aligned files, in a terminal (increment)
A patch shows you what changed. It doesn’t show you the file the change landed in. increment is my attempt at showing both, without leaving the terminal. increment is a terminal diff viewer. The …
Mermaid to SVG without a browser, and with the labels still there (mmd)
Convert a Mermaid diagram to PDF with an SVG-only toolchain and you can get boxes and arrows with no words in them, and no error telling you the words are gone. mmd exists because of that failure. mmd …
When an agent can already write the file, what is an MCP server for?
Agents are very good at writing files. So when a tool’s input is a file, an MCP server in front of it starts out with a problem: the agent can already do the job without it. The server has to earn its …
The release pipeline four tools kept reinventing (release-kit)
Every tool I build for myself needs the same last mile: binaries for my machines, a Homebrew formula, something bx can run. That’s the same work each time, and I kept writing it again for each tool. …
Stop declaring what you can already read (myspec)
Every time you ask someone to tell your tool something it could have found out, you’ve created a second copy of a fact. Second copies drift. In an agent’s toolchain there are a lot of facts, and until …
Letting an agent read your mail: split the reader from the network
Every email in your inbox was written by someone else, and most of them were written by someone you’ve never met. Hand that inbox to a model and you’ve handed it several hundred prompts from …
Cadence is a budget line: what scheduled automation cost a private repo
A cron line looks like a latency setting. 0 * * * * reads as “check every hour, so nothing waits long.” In a private repository it’s also a purchase order, and it reorders every hour whether or not …
Making a Code Graph Admit What It Doesn't Know (symgraph)
A tool that says “I don’t know” is annoying. A tool that guesses, and returns the guess in the same shape and the same confident tone as a fact, is worse than useless — because the thing reading it is …