I Am Ralph – CRESS Principles in Practice

Since I wrote about my CRESS principles for context engineering – contexts should be Current, Refutable, Empirical, Small & Specific – I’ve been thinking about how that applies to my AI-assisted software development workflow. You won’t be surprised – if you follow this blog or know me professionally at all – to hear that I drive design and development with tests. You also won’t be surprised to hear that I work in small steps, solving one problem at a time. (Though you might be surprised at how small a step I mean by a “small step”). You probably won’t be surprised that I run my tests after every change to the code. And you probably won’t be surprised that I’m in the habit of committing changes when I see the tests pass, or that I often revert changes when tests fail. Nor will you be very surprised that I review the code after each small change, and not after a whole bunch of changes. I’ll look at the code carefully, perhaps run a linter to check for low-level problems that are easy to…