Alastair McClelland
Father, Husband and Software Engineer.
Recent Posts
All posts →Simplify, Then Add Lightness
2026-11-12 — Colin Chapman, Richard Gabriel and why keeping software simple means choosing what to leave out.
This One Is Mine
2026-04-20 — I built a TTS tool to give my agents a voice — and what that experiment taught me about Go, Python, and where expressiveness lives now.
Stop Telling Agents What to Do. Tell Them What You Want.
2026-04-13 — AI development is shifting away from prescriptive step-by-step instructions toward goal-based prompting — telling agents what outcome you want and letting them figure out how.
Pair Programming with AI Agents
2026-03-30 — Understanding how an AI agent thinks is the foundation that spec-driven development is built on — and conversation, not commands, is how you build it.
A Skill Is a Directory, Not a File
2026-03-23 — Most skills I see treat a skill as a single markdown file. But that's just the surface. The real power comes from how skills are designed to load only what's needed, when it's needed.
Agent Scopes in Practice
2026-03-16 — A follow-up to my post on agent scopes — what happened when I turned the idea into a working CLI tool that agents can actually use.
Agent Scopes - Keeping AI Solutions Right-Sized
2026-03-09 — Define boundaries and constraints for AI agents to prevent scope creep and architectural drift while maintaining autonomy and efficiency.