Bobby Smart bobbysmart.dev AI, coding, and craft
This is my personal corner: opinions, hot takes, and stories from building with AI. The practical guides and comparisons live at Codewalkers. Here I write the stuff with my own name and my own scars on it.
Current focus
What I'm testing right now
- AI coding tools in real projects (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), and what they actually cost versus what they save.
- Agents that write, refactor, and review: where they genuinely help, and where they quietly get in the way.
- Evals, guardrails, and the small habits that keep an AI-assisted codebase legible six months later.
Selected work
Practical AI systems that actually ship
- Workshop
Build your own coding agent
An eight-step workshop that builds a working code-editing agent from a bare API call, because the magic is an illusion.
- Writing
Codewalkers
A publication about AI coding tools and agents, written by people who actually ship with them. I'm the lead author and editor there.
- Writing
I spent a year building AI features and shipped nothing
What over-engineering burnout actually looks like from the inside, and the ordering mistake that caused it.
Writing
Field notes with receipts
Honest write-ups of AI coding tools: what I paid, what I shipped, and where the tool got in the way. Most of it goes out through Codewalkers. The longer, rougher notes live here.