Stop Using Dicts for Config — Use Pydantic Instead
Load your YAML/TOML config files into validated, typed Python objects. No more silent typos, no more runtime surprises.
Posts
AI-Assisted Coding: Knowing When to Type It Yourself
AI coding assistants are powerful. I use them daily. But the goal is to be efficient — not to maximize the percentage of AI-generated code in my projects. Here are five situations where I’ve learned to close the chat and just write the damn code myself. 1. Code you know by heart # You don't need AI for this users = [u for u in data if u["active"]] with open("config.json") as f: config = json.load(f) List comprehensions. Context managers. Basic dict manipulations. If you’ve written these patterns hundreds of times, the time spent typing a prompt exceeds the time spent typing the code. ...
Why I'm Writing About Clean Python and AI-Assisted Coding
I spent 10 years as a SAP BODS consultant. It taught me a lot — especially about the frustration of working inside a black box. When something broke, I often couldn’t dig into the internals. I had to work around limitations rather than through them. The tool did the job, but I never felt like I truly understood my own pipelines end to end. And let’s just say that debugging a data flow through a GUI with cryptic error messages at 2am — while the documentation loads slower than your will to live — builds character. A lot of character. If you’ve ever opened a support ticket hoping for answers and received “working as designed,” you know exactly what I mean. ...