the nilenso blog. ensonians write about work and life

What are popular AI coding benchmarks actually measuring?
Popular benchmarks are narrower than you'd want.
The common sense unit of work
Consider refactoring the unit of work that your team operates on.
The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
The craft of AI-assisted software creation is substantially about correctly managing units of work.
My Quarterly System Health Check-in
An operational exercise for engineering leaders.
Why Does AI Feel So Different?
More about the recursive paradigm shifting paradigm shift.
How I keep up with AI progress
A curation of quality sources to keep up with AI progress.
AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes
A playbook for building high-quality software with AI.
Experimenting with Self-Hosted LLMs for Text-to-SQL
Yogi pits local and frontier LLMs against each other to see how they fare on Text-to-SQL tasks.
Exploring RAG based approaches for Text-to-SQL
Tarun iteratively improves upon a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to generate SQL queries from natural language.
MCP explained without hype or fluff
tldr; like most protocols, MCP solves the M⨯N integration problem by turning it into an M+N integration problem.
A database optimisation story
Beyond code generation: how I optimised a database query with LLM assistance.