Blog de Joe Freeman

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Wiring a Documentation Gate Into Code Review

July 12, 2026

Documentation rots because updating it is manual, tedious, and easy to skip. An agent removes the first two problems — it will happily update every page that names a symbol it just renamed. It does nothing about the third. Nobody, human or machine, updates documentation they were never asked to update. So ask. Every change, automatically, as part of the review you already run. This is the mechanical companion to a longer argument I made about design-time and run-time documentation . You do not need to have read it. You need three things: a way to tell which documents are supposed to be true, a rule that fires when they stop being true, and somewhere to write that rule down where the agent will actually read it. 1. Only some documents owe the code the truth Rename a class and grep your docs for the old name. You will get hits in two very different kinds of documentation files. Your reference and how-to pages describe the library as it stands. They are ...

Agents Eat, Update and Create Documentation.

July 12, 2026

You Have No Excuse for Undocumented Code. Every engineer knows the three excuses, because every engineer has used them. Documentation is too expensive. Writing it well takes hours that could go into features, and it is never the thing that ships. Nobody reads it anyway. You spend a day on a beautiful design doc, and it goes to the wiki to die. Nobody opens it again. Ever. Documentation rots. You write it, the code moves, and within two quarters, the docs are lying to people. A wrong document is worse than no document. All three were true. This was not laziness but a rational response to a real cost-benefit problem. The math did not work. The math has flipped because of LLMs. Documentation stopped being a message from engineers to engineers and became the substrate that the machines building your software run on . LLMs are voracious consumers of documentation — and, it turns out, tireless producers of it. All three excuses are now dead, and here is the sh...

Removing prescription lens reflections in webcams via polarizing filters

July 05, 2026

Prescription lens wearers know that their glasses can catch monitor reflections that can be seen whenever they are "on camera", in meetings, or when creating content. This can be exacerbated by blue light, anti-reflective, or other coatings applied to the lenses. We can remove monitor reflections by covering webcams with polarizing filters. Effect Flat-panel monitors often have polarizing filters that emit light waves oriented in a particular direction. The light on our glasses and in our reflection is essentially polarized. We can remove the monitor reflections by covering the camera with a polarizing filter. The filter needs to be rotated to orient the polarization to the minimum visible reflection. The picture on the left shows the monitor reflection in my prescription lenses. The picture on the right shows the lens reflection after putting a polarizing filter in front of my webcam. Polarizing filters will not remove the entirety of the reflection. The monitor l...

My biggest coding headache this weekend was managing the docs, specs and plans

June 14, 2026

Documentation is the code you write when working with LLMs. The Agent is the compiler. Specs used to be written once and ignored. With LLMs in the loop, they become shared state - drafted, revised, and reconciled by humans and agents every time the system changes. Developer work in LLM-assisted development increasingly lives upstream of the editor: brainstorming, writing plans, and authoring skills. In practice, most of my time goes into shaping the problem so agents can take it from there—implementing features, generating tests, drafting documentation, and carrying parts of the SDLC forward without constant hand-holding. That upstream focus produces a growing body of specification: documents that explain not just what the system does, but why it is built the way it is. Every new brainstorming session, plan, or skill tends to spawn new docs and force updates to existing ones—merging overlapping specs, splitting bloated documents into sharper scopes, or retiring plans that no longer m...

Can Taalas really implement models in hardware that run 1000x more efficiently than GPUs?

March 30, 2026

I played with chatjimmy.ai. It was so fast that it felt fake. The biggest bottleneck in modern AI isn't the math—it's the memory. Taalas is solving this by taking a radical approach: implementing AI models in the hardware itself. By utilizing a fabrication process with 4-bit transistors to implement FP4 natively in silicon, they effectively achieve one parameter per transistor. Because the model is built into the chip, they completely bypass the traditional memory wall. The result is a hyper-dense architecture that delivers 1000x better performance than conventional GPUs. To experience the latency of hardwired AI firsthand, check out their demo at chatjimmy.ai . HC1 demonstrates the power of Taalas hardcore model silicon technology, delivering 17k tokens per second per user on Llama 3.1 8B model. I can hardly wait for translation devices and personal assistants with this kind of speed. Hype or game changer? I don't know, but I'm excited. Limitations The model i...