Your AI Coding Agent is a While Loop With Delusions of Grandeur

The first time I used Claude Code to refactor an entire module, it felt almost mystical. I described what I wanted, went to grab a coffee, and when I came back, there was a pull request with 14 files changed, updated tests, and a decent commit message. “This is magic,” I thought. It’s not magic. It’s a while loop. Michael Bolin from OpenAI recently published an article dissecting the internals of Codex CLI. And it turns out that the secret behind AI coding agents isn’t a groundbreaking algorithm or an enigmatic neural network. It’s a loop that calls an LLM, executes tools, and repeats until there’s nothing left to do. ...

March 11, 2026 · Fernando

From /simplify to the Jedi Council: How I Built a Code Review with Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Mike Acton

Claude Code includes a slash command called /simplify that automatically reviews your code. I ran it on a hefty diff — about 500 lines across 8 files — and the results were… interesting. It found things I wouldn’t have noticed, but it also wasted my time pointing out stuff that didn’t matter. So, I took it apart and rebuilt it piece by piece. What Does /simplify Do? It’s a skill that comes bundled with Claude Code (you don’t install it). It launches three agents in parallel, each looking at the same diff from a different angle: ...

March 9, 2026 · Fernando

/loop in Claude Code: the cron that lives and dies with your terminal

For months, I’ve been running Claude Code tasks using a homemade cron. A Bash script that starts a headless session, feeds it a prompt, waits for it to finish, and then closes. It works. Barely, but it works. I’ve got it up on GitHub if anyone’s interested. Then on Friday, with version 2.1.71, Anthropic introduced /loop. A native scheduler. Built directly into Claude Code sessions. My first reaction was: “They killed my project.” ...

March 9, 2026 · Fernando

Claude Code Native Build: 100MB Binary to Ditch Node for Good

A 100-Megabyte Binary for a CLI Anthropic just announced that Claude Code is now available as a native build. Translation: a binary executable you can install with a curl command that doesn’t need Node.js. Sounds good, right? One command, no dependencies, background auto-updates. Any CLI tool’s dream. But there’s a catch: the binary weighs 100MB. To put this in perspective, the git binary weighs about 3MB. curl is less than 1MB. Even Go, which has a reputation for generating fat binaries, rarely exceeds 15-20MB. ...

January 27, 2026 · Fernando

10 GB VM for a chatbot: What the hell is Claude doing on your Mac

The 10 GB surprise You install Claude Desktop on your Mac. Everything’s fine, the app is lightweight. But one day you check your disk and discover this: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle 10.8 GB. Excuse me? Ten gigs for a chatbot? What’s in there, the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy? Nope. It’s Ubuntu. The Claude product trinity Before I explain the what, let me explain the why. Anthropic has three ways to give you access to Claude: ...

January 25, 2026 · Fernando

Your Terminal is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin

The crime scene Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café. A latte, views of the basilica, and yours truly with a shiny new MacBook Air M3 ready to work a couple hours with Claude Code before a meeting. Two hours later: battery at 15%. Red alert. Panic. But how? I was just in a terminal writing code. No video, no Zoom, nothing that would justify this kind of consumption. I open Activity Monitor, Energy tab, and there’s the culprit: Ghostty, with an accumulated consumption of 3,600 over the last 12 hours. For context, Brave Browser consumed 125. Zoom with video, 99. Claude (desktop app), 46. ...

January 24, 2026 · Fernando