iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

For a while I've been using gpt-5.6-terra to implement OpenSpec specifications pretty successfully. In the last week it's become infuriating. I give it a clear "definition of done - ALL tasks completed and checked - ALL tests passing. Don't stop until you're done" and yet it keeps stopping anyway.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Last week we launched my latest course on @pluralsight.bsky.social - "Applying Dependency Injection & Middleware in ASP․NET Core 10" Please check it out at www.pluralsight.com/courses/appl... #dotnet #aspnetcore

pluralsight.com

Applying Dependency Injection & Middleware in ASP.NET Core 10

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Helpful, thanks @visualstudio.com. What is "s"! Had to kill the process. I feel it may be punishing me for opening it less now I'm mosting in AI terminals and VS Code! #visualstudio

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

At the gate and soon on my way to NDC Copenhagen hosted by @ndcconferences.com. Hope to see a few familiar faces and meet many new ones while I'm there!

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NDC Conferences @ndcconferences.com · 28/05/2026

NDC Copenhagen is almost here, and we couldn't be more excited! If you haven't grabbed your ticket yet, there's still time. Come join us next week for world-class talks, brilliant speakers, and great company. See you there! 🇩🇰 Tickets -> ndccopenhagen.com #NDCCPH

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

So GitHub Actions is down (again) and blocking me! Great!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Pretty staggered to find that resource constraints in Azure mean I can't deploy a side project requiring SQL to any UK region currently. The promise of the cloud model is somewhat failing at this point and I have to assume that AI is crippling the availability of compute.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Sonnet 4.6 is annoying me! Gave it a clear openspec with 8 deliverables. Asked it to implement deliverables 1 to 3 (more token efficient) but it implements randomly tasks from all deliverables, but not all tasks for all deliverables, burning a huge chunk of my #claudecode pro 5 hour window!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

One of the things I enjoy about AI agents is the brainstorming phase. I have CEO, Requirements Analyst, PM and Solution Architect personas that I use to take a feature idea and have them challenge me on the functionality and technical aspects. I ask them to be 95% confident my intent is understood.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Codex has got me back to productive on my side project this morning. Churning through deliverables on my next feature around preparing the children to head out to a local zoo with the occasional prompt. Claude usage was 77% 5hr after the first small change. Codex is on its 10th with 65% remaining.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I'm trying out Codex CLI and the pro subscription this morning. Claude Code seems to have become unusable with the whole token usage fiasco. I've removed most of my helpful infrastructure to save tokens but even plain openspec apply tasks are burning my usage and the changes are slow too.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Another example of AI acting like a lazy developer (and yes, humans do this too). Here @github #copilot decided to ignore common file separation and use "a shortcut" by just throwing them into an existing test file. Overall it saved me time on a chore, but I still have to watch closely.

Asking copilot why it put some unlrelated tests into an existing test file. Here is my prompt: "The only thing I want to challenge, is why are the dbcontext tracking guards in #sym:FeatureFlagTests rather than a distinct well named class?" And here is the relevant part of the response: "I put them in FeatureFlagTests as a shortcut because I was already modifying that file, but that conflates concerns and makes discoverability harder for future maintainers."

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Reposted by Steve Gordon

ILSpy - .NET Decompiler @ilspy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

The final preview of #ILSpy 10 is ready for download github.com/icsharpcode/...

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I'm continuing to experiment with subagents and an automated ochestrated workflow for feature implementation, with QA and code review. It's kinda working, but it burns tokens and several steps just fail and the ochestrator (main session) end up doing the work again. Needs more investigation!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

One of the reasons I'm spending time learning about #ClaudeCode subagents is that while my workflow has been quite productive, I'm becoming the slowest part of the process, manually orchestrating various sessions. Keeping track became hard and tiresome so I ended up with notes to keep track!

A notepad showing features or phases being implemented with columns to identify when various workflow steps had been manually triggered by me. Basically a large table of check marks to visually track my manually session workflow before subagents.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

This morning I am playing with #ClaudeCode subagents and building a test workflow.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Yuk! Caught Claude Code using AsyncLocal to work around a pooled EF DbContext rather the recommended pattern of scoped factory. Code reviews are still important people! The challenge is that I find reviewing/reading code I haven't written quite slow as I need to build up the context. #dotnet

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

One unhealthy habit introduced with my personal Claude Pro subscription is wanting to maximise my usage. I now find myself starting as session as soon as I wake to maximum the number of 5 hour windows I get. Also juggling prompts to get the maximum 5hr and weekly token usage.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

At a motorway services on our way home from 11 days in Wales. It's been a nice break with lots of activities and outings for the girls. Had a surprise extra cost of £313 yesterday after bursting a tire in a nasty hidden pothole. Glad we could get it replaced rather than limp home on the spare!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

I've been refining this workflow and its now quite efficient. Agents log at the end of a session and include a handover (if needed) to another persona. I can then quickly bring a new session up with the correct role and point it at the handover to continue the next steps.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

In a side project experiment with AI, mostly #claudecode, I've been reviewing the code its written before committing but I was kinda ignoring the tests. Now having reviewed some of them, they need some major work to remove brittle asserts and teach it about parameterised TUnit tests!!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

After a bit of an infuriating time bouncing between #claudecode sessions in a dev and then qa persona, looping until it finally does things reasonably well, I've started experimenting with a devlog skill to summarise what is done, left over in each session and provide a handover the next agent.

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Reposted by Steve Gordon

Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 10/03/2026

It's Claude Time again! Today @rendle.dev and I are joined by @richcampbell.bsky.social - let's see if Claude Code can build user interfaces? Can it understand sketches and scribbles? Tune in: twitch.tv/dylanbeattie (or youtube.com/dylanbeattie if Twitch isn't your jam)

Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

My current frustration with my AI agent workflow experiment, specifically Claude Code is how quickly I burn my 5-hr usage on basically one small feature. I run in a #dotnet engineer persona to apply the OpenSpec change, then switch to a QA persona to review. 1/4

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I'm currently on holiday and I've been experimenting with using a multi-agent workflow, in part based on the great ideas presented by @rendle.dev on their stream with @dylanbeatt.ie to build out an idea without eating into family time.

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Emmz 💻🎸🎤🏳️‍⚧️ @rendle.dev · 27/02/2026

Yet more Claude talk and experimentation and such www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2rQ...

youtube.com

Claude Code Part 5: Let's Take A Moment And Talk About All This

YouTube video by rendle

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Reposted by Steve Gordon

Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 23/02/2026

Seems like @rendle.dev and my ad-hoc "wtf is Claude Code" series is getting some traction, which is heartening. We'll be on Wed + Thu + Fri this week, starting around 2pm UK time, live on Twitch (twitch.tv/dylanbeattie) and on YouTube (youtube.com/dylanbeattie). Tune in and chat - or catch up later.

Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Today was infusion day for me, which comes once every three weeks. I get to top myself up with fresh new antibodies. It requires turning my bedroom temporarily into a hospital! I've gotten used to the process after 6 months of doing it. A bit sore tonight and exhausted. #immunocompromised #cvid

Side table in a bedroom covered in medical supplies including infusion kits, needles, a syringe and HyQvia medication.

A bedroom with side table containing medical supplies for infusion, a sharps bin and a hospital grade pump next to the bed.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

As someone who was cautious and skeptical of AI coding agents, I'm starting to accept that these tools are hugely improved compared to where they were even 6 months ago. I made good progress on some changes fully in @github.com Copilot CLI yesterday. Next week I plan to try Claude Code.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I'm not sure the pilot for our flight is fully qualified!

Three year old sitting in the captains seat on board an A320 EasyJet flight.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Blogged: "Encrypting Properties with System.Text.Json and a TypeInfoResolver Modifier (Part 2)" www.stevejgordon.co.uk/encrypting-p... Continuing our journey by adding a component that can encrypt and decrypt data using AES-GCM. #dotnet

stevejgordon.co.uk

Encrypting Properties with System.Text.Json and a TypeInfoResolver Modifier (Part 2) - Steve Gordon - Code with Steve

In this post, we build out the AES-GCM encryption layer that we will depend on in future posts to decrypt JSON properties using System.Text.Json.

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Reposted by Steve Gordon

Maarten Balliauw @maartenballiauw.be · 30/01/2026

Submitted 2 security issues to NuGet and GitHub last year, finally heard back that they are low priority and not a big deal. I did manage to publish this package to NuGet. A bunch of unicode in there, but it looks genuine, right? Nobody would discover this via search because of the unicode.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Just blogged, live from @ndcconferences.com #ndclondon, "The Grand Mystery of the Missing 18 Bytes". An exploration of the implementation details affecting different values from benchmark allocation data when compared to memory profiler data in #dotnet. www.stevejgordon.co.uk/the-grand-my...

stevejgordon.co.uk

The Grand Mystery of the Missing 18 Bytes - Steve Gordon - Code with Steve

In this post I will share the tale of the mystery surrounding different bytes counts between benchmark data and .NET memory profilers.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

You gotta love how CoPilot will confidently lie to you. Gave it compiling code to, asked it to find and fix a small bug. It found the bug (correctly) and fixed it, then builds and it fails. It locates a malformed byte literal and states "There's a syntax error in the file (not related to my change)"

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

This week I've been learning about AssemblyLoadContext to solve a tricky dependency issue in the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) for #dotnet. I finally have a POC working that avoids dependency conflicts for profiler-based use cases. It's not perfect but still it's good progress!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

The week before NDC London is marked with fitting in rehersals of my talk early in the morning. I'm excited about my new session "Application Peformance Optimisation in Practice" which is 30-35 mins of pure demo. Refining my slides and key points to round off the remainder of the talk. #dotnet

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Blogged: Encrypting Properties with System.Text.Json and a TypeInfoResolver Modifier (Part 1). In this post we start creating a TypeInfoResolver modifier in System.Text.Json to encrypt and decrypt JSON properties during serialisation. #dotnet #json www.stevejgordon.co.uk/encrypting-p...

stevejgordon.co.uk

Encrypting Properties with System.Text.Json and a TypeInfoResolver Modifier (Part 1) - Steve Gordon - Code with Steve

In this post we start creating a TypeInfoResolver modifier in System.Text.Json to encrypt and decrypt JSON properties during serialisation.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

For Christmas i requested a few ingredients towards making my favourite cocktail. Besides ice and water, I'm missing a key ingredient here, which i thought we had. What is it and what am I making?

A selection of cocktail ingredients. Woodford Reserve bourbon, Angostura Aromatic Bitters, sugar and utensils.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Tried PowerPoint CoPilot this afternoon just to see if it could help with a template and initial slide creation from my notes, assuming it would be a bit like GitHub CoPilot. Nope! Not that useful at all, just links to free templates sites. It feels like it could deliver so much more!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

It's 2025 and I'm still forced to download a third-party video player because Windows Media Player can't... well, play media!

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I keep seeing cases where orgs want to introduce observability to their applications, but almost as a tick box exercise. They want to enable the zero-code instrumentation and call it job done. I wish more saw this step as the start of the journey, not the end. #observability #dotnet #opentelemetry

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

At an Airbnb tonight ahead of a trip to Lapland UK tomorrow. Freezer is frozen solid (I guess that's because it's so close to Lapland!). It's listed to sleep 6. In the drawer are 3 knives, 2 spoons and 1 fork. Thankfully we are here for only 1 night.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I've been using TUnit recently for in-memory integration testing of #aspnetcore and I really like it so far. The assertion syntax takes a little getting used to but the ease of setting up dependencies such as Elasticsearch is nicely done. #dotnet

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Safia Abdalla @captainsafia.com · 10/11/2025

First: I am really proud of this blog post title. It’s for the girlies (IYKYK). Second: .NET 10 drops tomorrow, so I did a whirlwind tour of the big and small features I worked on this cycle. Third: go read it! #dotnet #aspnetcore 📰 :https://blog.safia.rocks/2025/11/10/aspnetcore-ten/

blog.safia.rocks

And just like that .NET 10 ships tomorrow

A look at key ASP.NET Core features shipping in .NET 10, including: model validation for Minimal APIs, OpenAPI 3.1 support with unified JSON Schema, improved integration testing with top-level…

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

🧵 For a side project, I've been hacking on two practical usability "features" onto top of the Activity API and #OpenTelemetry processors. I'm calling them, "rollup spans" and "conditionally suppressed child spans". 1/4

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Made my first use of the new field keyword in #csharp 14 today with a lazily initialised property.

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Steve Gordon @stevejgordon.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

I've been having a fun little #dotnet hack to support automatically encrypting and decrypting sensitive values during serialisation using System․Text․Json. It's spiraled from a small POC to a more complex semi-real world example. I'll try to work out how to carve it up for blog and video content.

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