Michael Swanson

Writing

Notes on building things

A small number of long-form technical articles each year: software engineering, AI, developer tooling and automation. Subscribe via RSS.

  1. AI Flattened the Testing Pyramid. Here Are Six Tests to Add.

    16 min read

    AI made every layer of the testing pyramid about equally cheap. These are the six tests I added above my unit tests in two days, with $0 spent on CI servers or device farms, each with the prompt that built it.

  2. My Kid Reads Chinese. I Don’t. So I Built an AI Teaching Assistant.

    1 min read

    Our kid reads their Chinese homework aloud in the car after school. I can’t follow along while driving, so I built a free Claude skill that checks the recording against photos of the pages.

  3. How Claude Can Get Product, UX and Engineering to Stop Arguing

    13 min read

    Vague epics, alignment meetings and "the app doesn't work that way," collapsed into one loop: Living Mocks, HTML mockups built from the app's own code, decisions grounded in what that code can do, and Claude Design keeping everything aligned.

  4. Team-Grade Releases for Solo Side Projects

    12 min read

    QA, DevOps, security and release management for apps on Google Play, run by one developer. What I kept, what I compromised, and why quality didn't slip.

  5. Building Driftwell with Claude

    10 min read

    Claude turned my idea for a sleep app into a real Android app on Google Play, fast. Deciding what sounded right, and finding out whether people want it, stayed my job.

  6. I Released Driftwell for Android

    1 min read

    Driftwell plays spoken affirmations you pick, in a voice you pick, over soundscapes and frequencies you pick. No ads, and it works offline.

  7. Three Tries at NC’s Math Acceleration Test, So I Built an App

    5 min read

    My daughter took North Carolina’s math acceleration test three times before she passed. I built a free practice app so my son can study the right material the first time.

  8. AI Tools Want a Well-Formed Bug Report. I Have a Voice Memo.

    4 min read

    Coding agents expect a clean, well-formed request. Real bug reports never look like that.

  9. AI Fitness Coaching Is a Context Problem

    22 min read

    I built my own coach out of three MCP servers wired into Claude. The interesting engineering wasn't the prompt, it was the data.