Despair Driven Development

AI Agents Won't Save Your Legacy App. Architecture Still Matters.

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The pitch goes like this: point an agent at the codebase, wait a weekend, ship a rewrite Monday. I have watched smart teams believe this and then spend the next quarter explaining outages.

Building a CLI Tool in Go: Part 3 - Testing & Release

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got a working CLI from Part 1 and Part 2. Now let’s make sure it doesn’t break and ship it properly.

Building a CLI Tool in Go: Part 2 - Commands & Config

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Part 1, we set up the skeleton. Now let’s give it bones.

We’ll add a scan command that reads a config file and does something marginally useful.

Building a CLI Tool in Go: Part 1 - Project Setup

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every side project starts with optimism. This one started with go mod init and a vague sense of dread.

In this series, we’ll build a real CLI tool in Go — something that actually solves a problem rather than just proving we can parse flags. We’ll use Cobra for the CLI framework and ship it with proper tests and CI.

The CDK Pattern That Saved My Sanity

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After deploying the same stack to 4 environments with slightly different configs and watching the copy-paste entropy grow, I finally built the pattern I should have started with.

matt@fitzpatricksoftware.com (Matthew FitzPatrick) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Agentic Coding Needs Architecture: Guardrails for AI-Generated Enterprise Code

AI coding agents make software changes faster, which means architecture boundaries, tests, and review discipline matter more than ever.

Spec Driven Development
TDD (human in the loop writes the unit tests to shape the client code direction)
Optimizing root AGENTS/CLAUDE file
Managing multiple concurrent local agents
Triggering hosted agents