/ Notes from my R&D days. 2026-10-01T13:04:45+02:00 Neil Boyd / Jekyll © 2026 Neil Boyd /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-10-01T00:00:00+02:00 2026-10-01T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-10-01/ Neil Boyd

What are code reviews even for? We’ve always known this: Keep changes small. Write a meaningful description of what changed and why And that doesn’t change. But if we were doing it wrong before, then AI inherited it, and then amplified it. It goes on to describe Meta’s Risk Aware Diff Auto Review (RADAR) system where scarce human attention should be reserved for changes where human judg...

2026-08-21T00:00:00+02:00 2026-08-21T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-08-21/ Neil Boyd

The AI productivity gap Explains why AI doesn’t let us create software quicker. For senior developers, writing code was never the hard part. And to counter the argument that juniors are the ones mostly likely to be put out of a job by AI: it’s juniors who stand to gain the most from AI – especially if they are good at using AI as a learning tool An Architectural View of ML.NET Refresher...

2026-07-27T00:00:00+02:00 2026-07-27T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-07-27/ Neil Boyd

How Claude Code Works, From Tokens to Agents Detailed description of how AI coding assistants work. They’re not magic — they’re token-predicting models in loops with tools. Some interesting takeaways: the model doesn’t use facts - it assigns probabilities if you ask “the capital of France is…”, the most probable next token is “Paris”, but the model didn’t get that based on facts...

2026-07-08T00:00:00+02:00 2026-07-08T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-07-08/ Neil Boyd

When Agentic Coding Breaks Code Review A couple of very familiar phenomena. CORS: What is it protecting? Explaining that CORS is a browser security measure, in case you didn’t already know that. EF Core in Clean Architecture the Pragmatic Way Making the case for using EF Core DbContext directly instead of adding a repository extraction, because EF Core is already an abstraction. Spec-driv...

2026-05-27T00:00:00+02:00 2026-05-27T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-05-27/ Neil Boyd

Functional Programming in C# 15: Union Types and the ApiResult Monad A union type is a type that holds exactly one of several named cases at a time. Think of a monad as a smart wrapper around a value that lets you chain operations without checking for errors at every step. The wrapper carries the result or the failure through the pipeline — you only inspect the outcome at the end. We ca...