Remember that
Commodore 64
blinking cursor?
And the feeling that this machine could do anything
— if you just knew how to talk to it.
>_ Turns out, that's still the job.
From Spaghetti AI to Structured Systems
AI is moving from an unstructured "spaghetti" phase to a structured one — a shift that mirrors how software development matured. Skills, hooks, sub-agents, and commands have moved AI from prompt engineering to designing systems of context.
Who's behind this.
Ahmed Khalifa
Kode Kreations
TELUS
Principal Engineer
ApplyBoard & BlueDot
Principal Engineer
Architech & Rangle.io
Technical Leader, Cloud/DevOps
IBM
WorldWide Consultant, Application Servers & Enterprise Architecture
Roots Commodities (Egypt)
Technology Consulting
University of Toronto
Instructor, Certificate of Cloud Computing
Pumpkin
Chief Distraction Officer
I got my first computer — a Commodore 64 — before most of my friends knew what a computer was. Three decades of building things followed: PC applications in the 90s, enterprise middleware and web-scale systems at IBM's Toronto lab, then cloud, DevOps, and the full delivery lifecycle across startups and large organizations.
Every wave has been exciting. This one is different.
The AI revolution is the single biggest shift in how software gets built since the internet — and I'm genuinely having the time of my life working in it. Context engineering, agentic systems, autonomous development loops — these problems reward deep systems thinking. That's the work I've spent thirty years preparing for without knowing it.
Chief Distraction Officer · Senior Keyboard Consultant
Meet Pumpkin.
Pumpkin joined the team in May 2022 with zero technical skills and an unwavering commitment to sitting directly on the keyboard at the worst possible moment. Her speciality is interrupt() — typically mid-sentence, mid-thought, or exactly when a deployment is running.
Despite this, productivity is up. Turns out a mandatory "step away from the screen" every ninety minutes is actually good engineering practice. We're calling it canine-driven development.
She does not write code. She does not review PRs. She has, on at least two occasions, walked across the keyboard and somehow improved the formatting.
She is not available for hire. But she appreciates the thought.
Want to talk about ideas?
Something you read here sparked a thought, you disagree with something I wrote, or you just want to talk about what's happening in AI — I'm always up for that kind of conversation.
No commitment. Just a conversation.
