Journal

When to Use What: Choosing the Right Claude Code Harness for the Task

Hooks, skills, CLAUDE.md, MCPs, sub-agents, plan mode. A practical decision framework for picking the piece of the harness that actually earns its keep on the task in front of you.

Claude Code gives you six different ways to shape a session. Most teams reach for the wrong one and wonder why the loop feels slow. Here's how we decide, task by task, which piece of the harness is worth the setup cost.

How to Share Claude Code Skills Across Repos, Teams, and Clients

Skills are the new unit of institutional knowledge. Here's how we package, share, and govern them across a studio that runs on Claude Code.

Claude Code skills are reusable slash-command workflows. Once they exist, the question is who gets to use them: you, your team, your org, or a specific client. Here's the sharing model we run at Black Flag and the disciplines that keep it from rotting.

What Designers Need to Know About Claude Code

Claude Code isn't just an engineering tool. For designers, it's the fastest path we've found from a Figma frame to a production-quality build, if you know what to feed it.

Designers asking whether Claude Code is for them: the answer is yes, but not the way engineers use it. Here's what a year of design work in Claude Code taught us: the habits that translate polished intent into shipped UI without losing the craft.

Migrating Mission-Critical LLM Systems from Freeplay to Arize Phoenix

Freeplay shuts down May 15. If evals and traces are in your production loop, here's how to move them to Phoenix without losing the discipline you've built.

Freeplay closes May 15, 2026. For teams with mission-critical LLM systems, this is a forced migration with a hard deadline. A practical plan for moving evals, traces, and review loops to Arize Phoenix — without regressing on the quality signals you rely on.

Six Principles for Shipping Reliable Software with AI

How we stay sane while "vibes" infiltrate codebases — the playbook we run on every engagement.

AI-generated code floods projects with promises of speed and delivers drift instead. Six disciplines turn it back into a reliable tool: small scope, human judgment, repeated purpose, weekly planning, active management, and continuous improvement.

AI Agents: The Race Against Us

In American folklore, there’s a legendary railroad worker named John Henry who raced a steam-powered drill through a mountain. Spoiler The story goes that John Henry beat the machine in that race by sheer grit, only t...

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and Sky: The Comeback of “Seeing AI” (Without the Creep Factor of Windows Recall)

Remember Microsoft’s Windows Recall? The feature that thought screenshotting your entire desktop every few seconds was a great way to “help you remember things”? Yeah… that didn’t go so well. People weren’t thrilled a...

Your App Idea Sucks

When anyone with a bit of time and credits can work with a code generation assistant to ship a functional, secure web application in a weekend, "ideas" are not valuable. If you’re still pitching “an app that does X,”...

The Maximum Rate of Consumption

Do you ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of emails, posts, notifications, and alerts? You’re not alone. By 2025, the sheer volume of information bombarding us daily is unprecedented.

Agent Experience (AX) Design - Designing for New "Users"

Welcome to a New Era of Experience with AI Agents by Kat Holmes of Salesforce makes a compelling case that as AI agents become “digital coworkers,” they must be treated as a new kind of user—with their own goals, need...

How do engineering teams maximize productivity with strategic use of AI enabled software tools?

Our recent team discussion Black Flag Design on AI-assisted development, particularly using Cursor, provided interesting insights into optimizing workflows, efficiency, and costs. Here's what me, Bobby Nicholson, Ryan...

Automation and Equality: Does Progress Inevitably Breed Inequality?

In 1879, economist Henry George posed this question in Progress and Poverty, observing that industrial advances enriched some but left many behind. His era’s culprit? Land monopoly – the way rising land values let a f...