the art of simplicity

The 'goodbye loops, hello graphs' posts made me wonder whether graph engineering replaces the orchestrator/planner/coder/reviewer setup I'd already written about. It doesn't. One says who does the work, the other says how control and state move between them.

AI coding agents have a groundhog-day problem: every session they re-read the same files to rebuild the same mental model, then forget it all when the session ends. Graphify extracts your codebase into a graph; Google's Open Knowledge Format stores it as portable, git-versioned agent memory. Two commands, one afternoon.

Most of us aren't at a clean 'level' with AI coding agents; we're wedged between two. A field guide to the rungs and what actually changes as you climb: from pasting snippets into a chat box to running isolated, reviewed, token-lean agents you delegate from Slack.

Two open-source tools both hit ~60k GitHub stars in five months by attacking the same problem from opposite ends: AI coding agents spend most of their tokens on plumbing, not thinking. RTK compresses the output; CodeGraph eliminates the discovery.

Two weeks driving from London to Edinburgh for our 30th anniversary - the Roman Baths, the Ultra-Trail Snowdonia (UTMB) 25K, the Isle of Skye's wind, Highland cows, and Coy finally playing the Old Course at St Andrews.