Eleanor Berger intellectronica

How Ramp Built Self-Maintaining Software

Alex from Ramp Labs describes an experiment in making Ramp Sheets more self-maintaining by connecting background coding agents to production observability. The core shift is that AI has reduced the effort of writing code, so the bottleneck moves to maintenance, monitoring, triage, and directing agents at the right problems. Ramp's answer is not merely "an agent that codes", but a system where agents inspect live behaviour, create monitors, respond to alerts, tune noisy signals, and generate pull requests for real issues.

The Bottleneck Moved From Coding To Maintenance

The talk begins with Ramp Labs' broader AI work, including Ramp Sheets, Latent Briefing, and steering vectors, but quickly centres on a practical problem: once AI can handle much of the coding, engineers spend more time deciding what needs attention.

"code maintenance"

Building Your Own Software Factory - Eric Zakariasson, Cursor

Eric Zakariasson argues that agentic software work is moving from pair-programming toward managed production systems: developers increasingly define intent, constraints, feedback loops, and verification rather than writing every line themselves. Cursor is not fully at the "software factory" stage yet, but parts of its product and company already run with high autonomy, offering practical lessons for teams trying to build similar systems.

The Autonomy Ladder

The talk frames AI coding progress as a climb through levels of autonomy:

Autocomplete: the earliest Cursor-style experience, where AI accelerates local coding.
Pair programmer: the common current state, where humans ask questions, request changes, and review suggestions.

Harness Engineering: How to Build Software When Humans Steer, Agents Execute

In this AI Engineer talk, Ryan Lopopolo argues that modern coding agents change the scarce resource in software engineering. The bottleneck is no longer typing implementation code, but designing the systems, context, guardrails, review loops, and operating practices that let agents reliably do the full job. His core claim is that engineering teams should reorganise around delegation, systems thinking, context management, and automation of acceptance criteria, rather than treating agents as autocomplete or code-writing assistants.

Code Is Abundant; Attention Is Scarce

"Code is free."

Lopopolo frames coding agents as a major shift in engineering economics: implementation is becoming abundant, while human time, human/model attention, and model context window remain scarce. Engineers now have access to the equivalent of many parallel implementers, limited mai

Here Be Git

I run dozens of tasks and experiments every day. More often than not, I want the agent to auto-commit to track revisions. But for that, I need a git repo and some instructions. This SKILL sorts that out, and even asks me questions.

Installation

Save SKILL.md to .claude/skills/here-be-git/

Open Archive Copy

A userscript that opens the current page in archive.ph with a single click or keyboard shortcut.

Handy for finding an archived copy of a paywalled or blocked web page.

Installation

Install a userscript manager extension such as Tampermonkey
Install open-archive-copy.js

GPT Image 1.5 SKILL

Use this skill to create or edit images using OpenAI's GPT Image 1.5 model.

Installation

Unzip gpt-image-1-5.zip into ~/.claude/skills or ~/.skillz/ or wherever you keep skills locally. Or upload it to the Claude app.

Here's my AGENTS.md (also linked from CLAUDE.md as @AGENTS.md) for hacking agentically on MDFlow recipes.

I have this in ~/.mdflow/, and the agents/recipes live in ~/.mdflow/agents/ and added to the path so that they can be invoked as commands.

With this I can use a coding agent like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in VSCode and say something like:

> create a new agent using copilot that reviews all the code files in this directory as a poem

GitHub Frontmatter Fix

Make GitHub markdown frontmatter readable again - collapsible, syntax-highlighted YAML!

Install this user script (using a monkey extension like TamperMonkey or similar) to reformat frontmatter in markdown files on GitHub (in both repos and gists) as collapsible, syntax-highlighted YAML.

	tmp() {
	mkdir -p ~/.tmp

	# Cleanup directories older than 23 days
	find ~/.tmp -mindepth 1 -depth -Btime +23d -delete 2>/dev/null

	local timestamp=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)
	local dir

	if [[ -n "$1" ]]; then

	<instructions>
	Create a structured summary of <input />, scaled to approximately [num-pages] page(s) when rendered.

	## Structure

	### Title
	Start with a `##` heading that captures what is being summarised (e.g., the article title, report name, or a descriptive title you create).

	### Opening Paragraph
	Immediately after the title, write a paragraph stating the core thesis or takeaway. No heading for this paragraph — just the prose.