Blog (page 3) • Chris Dzombak

… has too many hobbies.

Featured Posts ★

What software engineers bring to AI-assisted software development

LLMs don’t mean the end of software engineering as a profession.

Why tech companies encourage their software engineers to use LLMs

It's not news that many tech companies are encouraging or even requiring use of LLM coding tools like Claude Code. While reading Sean Goedecke's post about bad code at big companies, it occurred to me that tech companies are happy to have their software engineers use …

Streamlining my user-level CLAUDE.md

This post follows up on my post about getting good results from Claude Code. I've recently streamlined my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md based on: * Informal observations about what Claude does and doesn't do well * A desire to avoid conflicting with principles that seem to be built into …

Getting Good Results from Claude Code: Writing Good Prompts

Key to getting good results from Claude Code (and similar LLM programming tools) is writing good prompts. This is one area where your own programming expertise comes into play; you need to use it to provide guidance to the LLM and nudge it in the right direction. Good prompts are …

Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools

Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …

Getting Good Results from Claude Code

An updated version of my user-level CLAUDE.md is featured in this post from December 2, 2025. I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write …

Recent Posts

Celebrating 250(+) Public GitHub Repositories

I noticed that I have 262 public GitHub repositories! Some of those are inactive forks, and a number are unmaintained today, but still: that's a lot of software. I figured I'd celebrate by sharing a few highlights here, arranged by category: Popular, New, Useful, Weird, and …

LLM Q&A Technique: Context Priming

Even the best LLMs, equipped with web search & research tools, can inevitably hallucinate when asked questions about obscure topics — in today's case, how to accomplish various tasks using the NATS CLI. I combat this by using a technique called "context priming." (I didn't …

Ask Claude Code to fix CI

I teased this yesterday, and this is actually going to be a pretty short post. One thing I've used Claude Code for recently in small personal projects is to fix GitHub Actions CI failures. Often these are linter issues, but sometimes the workflow itself needs to be fixed, …

Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools

Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …

Teaser for upcoming Claude Code posts

Getting Good Results from Claude Code

An updated version of my user-level CLAUDE.md is featured in this post from December 2, 2025. I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write …

Navigating and Rewriting Legacy Systems

As I'm navigating this job search process, I've been asked several variants of the questions, "how do you work with a legacy or poorly-documented codebase? how would you rewrite one?" I figure this answer might be useful for others.

An improved nginx_ensite script

GitHub - cdzombak/nginx_ensite: Quickly enable/disable nginx sitesQuickly enable/disable nginx sites. Contribute to cdzombak/nginx_ensite development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubcdzombak I have long used a script called nginx_ensite to quickly test and enable Nginx site configurations. (It also comes with a sister …

Quick Devops Tool: gha-secrets-setup

Here's a small script I wrote a few days ago, gha-secrets-setup. This script accepts a GitHub repository URL and checks its GitHub Actions workflows for secrets references. Then, using the gh CLI tool, it checks which secrets haven't yet been configure. It interactively prompts you for …

How I share Bird Buddy photos online

I've developed a simple and fast workflow, along with several purpose-built pieces of software, for sharing Bird Buddy photos online here. I had several goals for this process: 1. Photos should be shared to a Lychee photo album on my picture-sharing subdomain 2. Uploading the photos should be …

A Lychee photo library tool for titling photos

One more Lychee tool announcement: GitHub - cdzombak/lychee-meta-tool: Quickly find & edit untitled photos in your Lychee photo libraryQuickly find & edit untitled photos in your Lychee photo library - cdzombak/lychee-meta-toolGitHubcdzombak lychee-meta-tool provides a streamlined, focused view of the photos in your Lychee library that are missing titles. …

Avoid unbounded inboxes; avoid stress

Unbounded inboxes create stress. This includes things like email and text messages, and I can't help you with those. But I have tools that will help you keep your Instapaper and Feedbin queues manageable! GitHub - cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver: Avoid stress: Automatically archive old unread entries in Feedbin.Avoid …

Recommendation: Microphone Setup for BirdNET-Pi

I run BirdNET-Pi at home and am excited to share that I have (finally) found a quality, ~$100, microphone setup for it! Listen to this recording: plenty of detail and clarity, and very little noise: American Crow 92 2025 07 31 birdnet 10 22 510:00/6.0241× This recording …

feedfilter: an RSS feed postprocessing tool

One of my newest open-source programs is feedfilter. As the name implies, it takes an RSS feed as input and produces a filtered version of that feed as an output. Filtering is performed on an item-by-item basis. The filtering decision for each item can be based on the item' …

I vibe-coded an AI photo organizer for Lychee

I mentioned recently my use of the Lychee program for hosting my photos/pictures website. I recently uploaded a backlog of a few hundred photos to the Unsorted section of that site, figuring I could organize them later. Then I realized: I could use AI to help organize them! So …