Software Engineering on Lami Adabonyan — Engineering & Product Leader

A Peek Inside My Dotfiles

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Freek Van der Herten recently published a tour of his dotfiles, so I opened mine to see what similarities and differences I would find. There are many similarities but the organizing principle is different.

My dotfiles live at ~/_dot/. At a high level:

~/_dot/
├── app-settings/ # Configuration for Ghostty, Micro, Yazi, Zellij, VS Code, and coding agents
├── dot-common/ # Shell aliases and functions used from .zshrc
├── dot-files/ # Traditional files such as zshrc, gitconfig, vimrc, and editorconfig
├── agent-library/ # Shared instructions, skills, and agent definitions
├── install.sh # Connects files in this repo to their expected locations
└── install-brew.sh # Installs the command-line tools used by the configuration

This is not every setting. These are the pieces that have earned their place.

The Agent Should Not Be the Architecture

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

The future of building apps is not “let the agent figure it out.”

It feels magical, fast, and useful to keep a Claude Code session open, throw it a feature, let it inspect the repo, and watch it wire things together. You think to yourself, the new development model is obvious: less architecture, more prompting.

This is the wrong lesson.

The app still needs to be deterministic. The handoff still needs to work when the original builder is gone. The team that inherits it still needs to understand where behavior lives, how state moves, what assumptions are encoded, and what has to be true before a change is safe.

Having First Dibs Is Overrated

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every new AI launch comes with the same implied question: Have you tried it yet? It’s tempting to think the right answer is always yes. It’s not.

Owning the first iPhone didn’t make you better at using smartphones. It just meant you got there first. Within a couple of years everyone else had the same capabilities, often with fewer bugs and a clearer idea of what actually mattered.

The same pattern keeps repeating in software. I see people contorting their workflow to accommodate whatever shiny beta feature launched this week. They’ll open one app just to send something into another app, even though the destination app already lets them do the same thing faster. The workflow bends around the feature. That’s backwards.

Is Gen AI Approaching Bubble Territory?

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gen AI looks like a bubble, but people are still using it to get real work done.

It’s the internet, cloud, and crypto rolled into one. Everyone’s betting big. But when you peel back the hype, a harder question emerges: is this transformation, or just the most expensive game of follow-the-leader in tech history?

The Emperor’s New Algorithm

We’re living through the most overhyped, under-delivered technology moment since the dotcom boom. But here’s the kicker: unlike 1999, this bubble might actually have substance underneath all the noise.

AI Fundamentals: Stripping Away the Jargon

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The tech industry has a knack for turning simple concepts into incomprehensible jargon. AI is no exception. Strip away the buzzwords, and you’ll find something remarkably straightforward and more useful than the hype suggests. Let’s walk through what AI actually is and where we are on the curve and journey to creating useful tools.

TL;DR

AI isn’t magic: it’s just advanced pattern recognition.
Generative AI (like ChatGPT) creates content but can’t act.
AI agents are the next step, giving AI “hands” to perform tasks.
The real opportunity is moving from talking to AI to having AI do work for you.

What AI Really Is - Spoiler: It’s Not Magic

Machine Learning is pattern recognition on steroids. Feed a computer enough examples of cats, and it learns to spot cats in new pictures. Show it enough chess games, and it gets decent at chess. It’s not thinking. It’s finding patterns in data, then applying those patterns to new situations.