A pastoral landscape with a farmer plowing in the foreground, a shepherd gazing upward, and ships in a harbor, while in the lower right corner a pair of legs disappears into the sea — the fall of Icarus, unnoticed by all. "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1560s. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Humans make mistakes, and not only can we learn from them, but we can learn how to put AI agents to work in ways that prevent them from making the same mistakes as we would.

In my latest post I delve into a mistake I made when I accidentally dropped a database.

www.spletzer.com/2026/04/the-...

Portrait of William Stanley Jevons, via University of Manchester Libraries, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

When things get cheaper, in many scenarios we often use more of them, not less.

A Victorian era economist figured this out about coal in 1865, the cloud proved him right again, and I (and others) think AI is next.

www.spletzer.com/2026/03/jevo...

An impressionist oil painting of a woman in a black hat and dark dress reading a newspaper in a sunlit garden. Woman Reading — Édouard Manet, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I wrote a follow-up to my post on information diet, and this time I got specific. I use RSS with Feedbin and NetNewsWire, subscribe to about 125 feeds, and don't have any social media apps on my phone, giving me more time for writing, thinking, and building.

www.spletzer.com/2026/03/cura...

A crowd of ghostly, pale-faced figures in dark clothing and top hats walk along a pier against a turbulent, swirling sky of deep blues and oranges, their hollow expressions conveying collective dread and unease. Art from Edvard Munch, Anxiety, 1894. Munch Museum, Oslo. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I opened a fresh Claude Code session, typed one prompt, and 40% of my context window was already gone.

I call this "dead context," and if you're running AI coding tools, you probably have the same problem without realizing it.

www.spletzer.com/2026/03/shed...

An oil painting of a lone farmer seen from behind, harvesting golden wheat with a scythe in a sunlit field, with his discarded Union Army jacket and canteen visible in the lower right corner. The painting is Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field," 1865. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

In 2024 setting up Python needed pyenv, pip, pipx, shell init scripts, and pain on Windows.

In 2026 it needs one tool: uv.

Same commands on every OS, 10-100x faster installs, and way simpler.

A new no-nonsense guide to setting up Python environments:

www.spletzer.com/2026/03/a-ne...

A hand-colored print of a gentleman in a top hat and tailcoat riding an early two-wheeled hobbyhorse, with another rider visible in the distance.

A Tale of Acceleration and Compound Engineering

www.spletzer.com/2026/02/a-ta...

Close-up of a marble angel statue by Michelangelo Buonarroti with a calm, expressionless face and curly hair, warmly lit, with one textured wing visible behind its shoulder.

Software has always felt like sculpture to me: you start with a block of possibility and chip away until the shape reveals itself.

AI coding tools are the fastest chisels (and the best shop assistants) I’ve ever had—but they don’t replace taste. They amplify it.

www.spletzer.com/2026/02/the-...

A landscape, movie-poster-style illustration inspired by 1980s adventure films. On the left, a rocky cave opening frames a bright moon as dozens of bats fly outward into the night sky. On the right, inside a dusty wooden closet, a grinning pirate skeleton wearing a hat and medallion holds a cutlass beside scattered gold coins and an old lantern. Bold retro lettering across the top reads "Fear, Paranoia, and Vibe Risk Management."

Skeletons are in your closets. Bats will fly out of your caves.

The question is whether you let them out now, or wait until your competitors do it themselves and find the hidden treasure on the other side before you do.

www.spletzer.com/2026/02/fear...

Minimalist infographic comparing a website before and after a refactor. Left side ("Before") shows a generic webpage labeled Bootstrap 3.2.0 with a large "143 KB CSS" file. Right side ("After") shows an HTML5-based page labeled WCAG 2.0 AA with a much smaller "10.7 KB CSS" file and checklist icons indicating accessibility improvements. Title at top reads: "One Day, Nine Phases, 93% Less CSS."

I spent a little bit of time with Claude Code this weekend and refactored something that had been on my backlog for a long time: my website.

www.spletzer.com/2026/02/one-...

Ronald McDonald and the Burger King sit side by side at a shared desk in a modern office, each wearing headphones and smiling while coding on laptops. Ronald, in his yellow-and-red striped outfit and clown makeup, works on a laptop labeled “Claude Code,” while the Burger King, dressed in a crown and fur-trimmed robe, uses a laptop labeled “GitHub Copilot.” Code is visible on both screens, with coffee cups and monitors in the background, creating a playful contrast between fast-food mascots and serious software development.

The laziest strategy in fast food may be the smartest strategy in AI.

In my latest post, I spend 1,500 words on a burger metaphor that probably could've been a tweet.

www.spletzer.com/2026/02/mcdo...

Dark-mode chat interface showing a message that reads, “I installed LazyVim for Neovim but I can't remember how.” Beneath it, a reply says, “lol, extremely relatable.” followed by a smiling emoji.

Well this is a ChatGPT first for me.

A digital illustration of a cluttered living room with piles of papers, books on crowded shelves, and tools scattered on the floor. Two friendly, futuristic AI robots stand just inside the open front door holding suitcases, looking into the disorganized space as sunlight streams in from outside, suggesting AI arriving as a guest in an untidy home.

New Blog Post: Tidying Your Home for Your AI Guests

www.spletzer.com/2026/01/tidy...

PowerShell to Distinguished Engineer with Ryan Spletzer. The PowerShell Podcast E208 YouTube video by PDQ

It was my absolute pleasure to be a guest on The PowerShell Podcast, where I had a great conversation with the illustrious Andrew Pla.

Get it wherever podcasts are sold!

YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryZ7...

Podbean (or grab it in your favorite podcast app): powershellpodcast.podbean.com

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans.

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A cropped version of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. On the right, God reaches out from a cluster of figures, labeled "AI" in bold white Impact-style text. On the left, Adam reclines on the ground, reaching back, labeled "THE REST OF TECHNOLOGY." The two hands nearly touch, parodying the original scene to suggest AI as a dominant, godlike force eclipsing all other technology.

Is it safe to write a blog post that isn’t about AI?

In this slightly humorous and irreverent reflection, I look at AI hype, technological amnesia, and why we keep pretending the rest of technology doesn’t exist.

(No agents were harmed in the writing of this.)

www.spletzer.com/2025/12/is-i...

Finally, someone wrote it down in a book:

To understand what is going well/poorly inside your engineering org: ask the devs what this is! Talk to a bunch of them to get a good picture

From the excellent new book by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda called "Frictionless"

Arrived yesterday

The repo: github.com/ryanspletzer...

MCP pushed me back into looking at OAuth extension specs, and I found myself in a spider web of browser tabsm so I decided to make a Mermaid graph diagram in a GitHub repo to visualize the specs and their reference relationships.

A wooden marionette with a long nose sits at a developer’s desk, strings tied to floating "PROMPT" and code icons, facing a monitor where a flow diagram ends at a glowing "DEPLOY" button; a loose cable and a shelf labeled "TOYS" underscore the fragile, toy-like nature of the build.

We’re living in the age of "vibe coding"—where it’s easier than ever to generate something that looks real.

But just because Pinocchio can sing and dance doesn’t mean he’s a real boy...

www.spletzer.com/2025/09/pino...

A conceptual diagram titled "Ask vs Act: Applying CQRS Principles to AI Agents." The diagram has two halves. On the left, a blue bubble labeled "Reading" connects downward to a smaller bubble labeled "RAG," which points to an icon representing documents and a database. On the right, an orange bubble labeled "Writing" connects downward to a smaller bubble labeled "Actions," which points to icons of a checkmark in a speech bubble and a gear. The two halves are connected side by side, visually contrasting how AI agents handle reading (retrieval) versus writing (actions).

I wrote a post about applying CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) principles to AI agents. www.spletzer.com/2025/08/ask-...

A minimalist graphic with the phrase “MCP is a USB port, not a hard drive” in bold black text on a light blue gradient background. Below the text are two black icons: a USB port on the left and a hard drive on the right, separated by a “not equal to” (≠) symbol, emphasizing the conceptual difference.

I wrote a blog post to try to disambiguate what MCP can and can't do, and what it is and is not.

www.spletzer.com/2025/08/mcp-...

Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho YouTube video by The Pragmatic Engineer

If you haven't had a chance to watch this Pragmatic Engineer interview with Gergely Orosz and Laura Tacho, I highly highly highly recommend it.

So many pull quotes from this discussion that resonated with me, thinking "Yes! Finally! Someone is saying it!" 🙂

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHHl...

A stylized illustration of an 'Information Diet' pyramid. The pyramid is divided into four layers from bottom to top: books, speech bubbles, and newspapers at the base; social media icons and short-form content in the middle; the Twitter bird icon in the upper tier; and a microchip labeled 'AI' at the top. The design uses muted shades of beige, blue, and orange to convey different types of information sources.

I wrote a post about your information diet in the age of AI.

www.spletzer.com/2025/07/your...

It is spelled: Copilot.

Not CoPilot.

Not Co-pilot.

Not Co-Pilot.

Copilot.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. 🙃

Wow. “These changes are meant to address what Microsoft sees as lagging internal adoption of its Copilot AI services, according to another two people with knowledge of the plans.”

It sounds like some of the lack of adoption is people using competitor’s tools.

A digital illustration titled "The Many Contexts of Model Context Protocol" shows a central AI model icon connected by lines to four surrounding icons: a desktop computer (local context), a cloud server (remote/server context), an office building (enterprise or multi-tenant context), and a person (user context). Each icon is enclosed in a circle with colorful backgrounds, symbolizing different deployment and usage contexts of MCP servers.

I wrote about the hidden complexities of running Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers locally vs remotely, and why deployment context shapes everything from auth to architecture.

👉 www.spletzer.com/2025/05/the-...

The curse of social media: not just for software engineering but other areas as I observe (say, hiring, investing, product management, venture capital etc)

Those the best at their craft are usually busy building not writing/posting. Viral posts often wrong in many ways etc
Via @icooper.bsky.social

Illustration for a blog post titled "Enterprise Search and the Myth of the Silver Bullet." The image features a large magnifying glass pointing from a search interface on the left to a silver bullet on the right. Abstract clouds and dots decorate the beige background, and the title is written in bold dark blue text.

I wrote a post about the area of enterprise search, where I spent a great deal of time over a decade ago in my career, and whose lessons I’m realizing are more relevant than ever today in the age of AI, RAG, and agents.

www.spletzer.com/2025/05/ente...

Much like the OAuth/OpenID Connect/JWT specs from the past, digesting these types of specifications can be a lot, which is why I took a stab at digesting this myself and distilling it into a blog post for all of you to enjoy.

SPIFFE/SPIRE give us a novel way to derive trust and authentication from the environment itself, which opens up a new world of possibilities and solves several classic problems related to secrets management at scale.