Claudio Lassala's Blog

Stubbed Endpoints – How We Build UI Before the Backend Exists

Moving at Human Speed – Reflective Practice Radio Ep 23

UX Comes Before UI – And Neither Is About Colors

Four Fields, Two Departments, One Bottleneck

Workflows First, CRUD Later

What Looks Like CRUD Is Often a Workflow

What AI Did with My Old Guitar Recording

One Why, Many Hows – The Golden Circle Inside Your User Stories

Beyond the Code – What Simon Sinek and James Clear Taught Me About BDD

Inside the Data Seeder — YAML, Visitors, and Event-Sourced Aggregates

From Dev Convenience to Client Demo: One Seeder, Many Jobs

Outside-In Design: From API Contracts to Read Models and Projections

The Important Thing Is Not to Know Everything

Story and History

Improvising Without a Script

The Recipe Pattern Part 4 – Testing Across the Boundary

The Recipe Pattern Part 3 – One Validator, Two Jobs

The Recipe Pattern Part 2 – What the Frontend Does with the Rules

The Recipe Pattern Part 1 – Why I Stopped Writing Validation Rules in the Frontend

Orchestrating My Music with Suno AI

Making Room for the Human Work

Purposeful Tools And Better Testing: Weekly Summary Podcast Episode #1

AI Music and the Things I Cannot Outsource

Choosing Your AI Tools With a Purpose

The Air Drum Moment

Why I Don’t Use E2E Tests for Everything

Readable Cypress Tests – Hiding the Plumbing Behind Plain English

Specs Not Tests: A Better Way to Think About Automated Verification

The Questions I Ask Stakeholders to Surface Edge Cases

User Stories Are Not Requirements, And That’s the Point

The Human Fingerprint

Story Quality Is Your AI Multiplier

Outside-In Development: Why We Don’t Start From the Database

Under the Hood: The Menu System in Code

A Menu System Built for Change, Not Just for Now

Business Value Is Personal

The Renewal Email That Never Came

The Stories That Built an Agent

The Cognitive Friction Problem

The Reluctant Expert – A Guide to Sharing What You Know

Is Your Vision Lost in Translation?

Building a Story-Writing Agent in Minutes

From User Stories to Story Arcs

Events, Not Meetings

Designing the Sprint Review Experience

Porting AI Skills Between Tools: A Cross-Platform Workflow

Obsidian + AI – Evolving Your Tagging System With Your Understanding

Bringing Your Obsidian Vault Into Your IDE Workspace

The Daily Note as Navigation Hub: Linking Sprints, Projects, and Meetings

Making Obsidian Your Source of Truth: Multi-Calendar Consolidation Without Sync

The Symphony of Software: AI Agents as Your Orchestra

Maintenance Beyond the Dashboard Lights

Why Sprint Retro Comes After Sprint Review

Success Is a Point in Time

Finding the Story Before Writing the Code

Status Fields Mean Different Things to Different People

When IT Jargon Replaces Business Language

The THINK Framework for Human Prompting

Daily Blogging, Values, and Building for Humans

Need, Problem, Solution – A Framework for Vetting Your Next Side Project

Prompting Frameworks and Finding What Works for You

Accountabilities, Not Roles

What Atrophies When AI Does the Work

Rally Racing and the Context Problem in AI Collaboration

Why I Think Hard About the Right Words

Inside Out Outside In — A New Mental Model for BDD

AI in the Scrum Loop

From Human Stories to Comic Strips to Video

The Trinity of Productivity

Stakeholder Engagement Playbook: From User Stories to Human Stories

Pondering my daily blogging experiment

93 Posts and What I Learned About Systems

Walking the Track – Why Slowing Down Helps Us Go Faster

“It Works on My Machine”, Revisited

Story-Showing with AI – Comic Book Workflow

Testing Behavior, Not Implementation

When to Use BDD Tools and When Not To

Before You Solve Problems, Understand Needs. Before You Understand, Needs Identify Values.

Time Isn’t Money, and That’s the Point

AI in Your Loop, Not You in Theirs

Bridging the Gap Between Technical Work and Business Impact

The Consultant’s Superpower Isn’t Mind Reading

Can They Be Coached? Can They Coach?

Sorry to See You Go

Spreadsheets and Hyperinflation

The Spreadsheet Question

Time, Presence, and the Speed We Choose

AI Agents as Cross-Functional Teams

Start Journaling Today

Why I Prefer Given-When-Then Over Arrange-Act-Assert

Behavior-Driven Refactoring: Beyond Arrange-Act-Assert

GWT Everywhere – A Shared Language for Tests and Specs

Most Developers speak with a thick technical accent

AI in the Loop – Centering Humans in AI-Assisted Work

Nine Questions About Speaking From My First Talk to Making It Your Own

A Workflow for Building Features with AI in the Loop

From Voiced Ideas to Published Post in 20 Minutes

From Cypress to Playwright, BDD and the Loop That Closes

Two Brits on Vacation in Spain and Finding Value

AI and the Human Side of Software Teams

The Floppy Disk Test for Vibe Coding

The Slow Fade of the Debugger

Product Owners – Bridge or Gatekeeper?

Driving, Flying, and the Speed of AI

Blind Spots, Trust, and Leaning Into What We Cannot See

Your Brain Can’t Multitask, But It Can Multithread

Stop Counting Passes: Event Sourcing and an Invisible Gorilla

Does Your Dashboard Earn Its Keep?

AI Starts at the Average — You Take It From There

Dashboard vs Cockpit

Create Everything – Daily Blogging and the Drive to Share Knowledge

Thought Leadership as Illuminating Knowledge Boundaries

Thought Leadership Is Not What I Thought It Was

From Conversation to Code

Trust-Agents-and-Human-Values

Stop Testing Your Code: Why the Best Developers Focus on Human Behavior Instead

Thinking in Multiple Languages

Stories, Not Requirements

A Year After Our AI Experiment – What Changed and What Did not

BDD Conversations Before Automation

History Repeats: From Spreadsheets to AI Tools

What Are You Actually Vibing With

Vibe Coding Is Just Bad Naming

Event Sourcing and the Past Tense of Given

Things I Take for Granted

Characterization Tests – A Way Into Legacy Code

Mastery Over Tools

Have Be or Do – Identity and Experience Over Possession

When Tools Cost Money and When They Cost Time

More (of What?) for Less (of What?)

What Are You Optimizing For?

When User Stories Describe Solutions Instead of Problems

The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Code—It’s Everything Around It

What Thirty Posts Revealed About How I Think

Thirty Days, Thirty Posts: What I Learned from Blogging Daily

Grounded in the Whirlwind

From ‘The User’ to ‘I’

Are You Writing Code or Solving Problems?

The Quiet Cost of Maintenance Work

Code Reviews Weren’t Meant to Be About Formatting

Beyond the Aquarium: Finding Yourself by Leaving Home

The Talk Delivered: When Preparation Meets Reality

Beyond the Tools: What Are We Actually Building?

Look for the Complete Story and Find Consistency Over Intensity

Tests Aren’t for Computers. They’re for People.

Working Offline: A Developer’s Past, Present, and Future

Pace Yourself

Productivity by Design, Not by Default

Preparing a Talk by Thinking Out Loud

Beyond Front-End and Back-End: What Developers Really Need Now

Stop Explaining and Start Showing

2025: Annual Review

The “Do It” Task: Your Scrum Board’s Silent Killer

The Bottleneck Isn’t Code — It’s Translation

Good Enough Answers First

CQRS and Human Intent

Reflection Over Resolutions

Why Code Quality Still Matters (Even When AI Writes It)

Tools Aren’t the Bottleneck

Voice Journaling Workflow – Now using AirDrop and a FolderAction

A Method for AI‑Assisted Pull Request Reviews: Aligning Code with Business Value

Favorite Books I’ve Read in 2025

My Favorite Quotes in 2025

Journaling Is the Smallest Habit That Keeps Paying Me Back

Rethinking My Annual Review: Leveraging a New Thought Partner

Rethinking Productivity: From Writing Code Faster to Solving Better Problems

Staying Oriented When Everything Speeds Up

Keeping track of what to journal

My first Alfred workflow

When Pace Becomes Maintenance

From Spoken Thoughts to Connected Notes: My Voice Journaling Workflow

Changing Our Position, Not Slowing the World Down

Sleep, Time, and AI: Rethinking How We Work

Need, Problem, Solution — Thinking Through the Spiral

The Drift of Memory, the Speed of Tools, and the Value of Story

AI Moved Fast This Year. Here’s How I Stayed Grounded.

Looking Ahead While Moving Faster: Lessons from AI, Mentoring, and Motorcycles

A Busy Summer in 2007: Conferences, Code, and Curiosity

Back to the Spiral #006 — Showing, Not Just Talking

Impact Technology: Rethinking Information and Wisdom

Revisiting 2007: Four Screens, FoxPro Farewells, and Lessons on Focus

The Timeless Habits of Effective Remote Teams

AI in the Trenches: Reflections on Real-World Software Practice

Looking Back: My First Year of Blogging (2005–2006)

20 Years of Blogging, One AI-Powered Cleanup

Balancing Input and Output

Capturing the Human Side of Software with AI Tools

BDD, but Not the Way You Heard It Before

Building Genius Mode: Behind the Scenes of Our AI Summer Camp Finale

Why We Never Face a Blank Page Again

From User Stories to Code: Pairing with AI

From Conversation to Clickable: Using AI for Task‑Based UI

The Business Case for Testing

Ship Faster, Learn Sooner: A Playbook for AI-Powered Sprints

From Typewriters to AI: Embracing (or Resisting) New Tools

We Test, Therefore We Smile!

Testing in Agile: From Afterthought to an Integral Part

Improving Development with Context-Based Testing

Refactoring Test Code: Beyond Red, Green, and Refactor

Anticipate, Compensate, Communicate: A Developer’s UX Mindset

Beyond Slides and Syntax: Public Speaking, Coaching, and AI

Context Beats “Vibe Coding”