Back to the homepage 10 volumes · Perranporth

The Shelf

Things I've written. Pull one out.

The One Red Run OCT ’26 22 OCT 2026 Opinion The One Red Run

A grid of small green squares, one per test run, with a single red square among them.

When did anyone count how often their tests caught a bug before AI? 22 OCTOBER 2026 · MARCO MARK

Every Session Is Day One SEP ’26 7 SEP 2026 Opinion Every Session Is Day One

A worn buff induction record card on olive drab canvas, its form fields left blank, one line blacked out, stamped VALID 30 SECS in red ink.

Onboarding an engineer takes weeks. An agent gets thirty seconds. 7 SEPTEMBER 2026 · MARCO MARK

Headless Chickens with Better Tools AUG ’26 27 AUG 2026 Opinion Headless Chickens with Better Tools

A boxy robot chicken on a factory conveyor belt, its head detached and sparking above its neck.

AI makes software cheap to build. Except the software was never the problem. 27 AUGUST 2026 · MARCO MARK

My AI Engineering Journey JUL ’26 14 JUL 2026 Retrospective My AI Engineering Journey

Five glowing terminal windows linked left to right, each a different colour, the last bursting into dashed lines.

Looking back, this wasn't really a sequence of tools. It was a sequence of bottlenecks. 14 JULY 2026 · MARCO MARK

Stop Calling It a Harness JUL ’26 13 JUL 2026 Opinion Stop Calling It a Harness

Five stacked labelled layers on a blueprint grid, reading model, harness, agent, context and workflow, with workflow highlighted.

The word harness has swallowed the whole agentic stack. Here is a cleaner five-layer model. 13 JULY 2026 · MARCO MARK

Spaghettification JUN ’26 18 JUN 2026 Opinion Spaghettification

A black hole ringed by a glowing orange accretion disc against a violet starfield.

A black hole is any gap in what your AI agent can see or verify. Fall into one and it improvises. 18 JUNE 2026 · MARCO MARK

Mister Circus APR ’26 13 APR 2026 Family Mister Circus

A vintage circus poster reading Zirkus Otto Mark, Mister Circus, above a big top tent at dusk.

Otto Mark of Grevenbroich-Kapellen. Master logistics coordinator. They called him Mister Circus. 13 APRIL 2026 · MARCO MARK

The Engineer That Was MAR ’26 13 MAR 2026 Reflection The Engineer That Was

A sepia polaroid of an old desktop computer, captioned The Engineer That Was, resting on an album page.

A year without writing code. How everything changed, and how quickly it started feeling normal. 13 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

FIGHT THE FRAMEWORK MAR ’26 11 MAR 2026 Opinion FIGHT THE FRAMEWORK

A pixel-art arcade versus screen pitting a Developer against a Framework between two cabinets.

Full-stack frameworks blur client and server. AI loves that about as much as implicit conventions. 11 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

2026: THE YEAR OF CLI TOOLS MAR ’26 6 MAR 2026 Opinion 2026: The Year of CLI Tools

A glowing amber CRT monitor in a dark room, showing a shell prompt.

The terminal is making a comeback. AI figured out what developers always knew. 6 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

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