If you use an AI coding agent daily, you have a toolbox of prompts and commands you've never once cleaned up. Here's the refactor, how to spot when yours needs it, and what happens when a tool outgrows the repo.
The same email address is radioactive in Frankfurt and confetti back home. That one cultural assumption sets the cost, the speed, and the safety of everything built on top of it.
My terminal has an org chart now. Fable does judgment, Opus ships, Sonnet handles the small stuff, Haiku does the summaries, and the cover art is outsourced.
A twelve-year-old in West Beirut is told to borrow a Muslim name to stay safe. Twenty years later in Germany, a registration clerk assumes the name anyway. The same scar, read two different ways.
From ordering Claude around like a code monkey to running real refinement sessions with it. The three things I changed.
Moving from a protected Staff Engineer role in Europe to planning a future venture back in the Levant exposes a brutal conflict: how do you compete against agencies built on exploitation without becoming exactly like them?
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