hica analyse: Measuring Functional Debt
05 Aug 2026I ran hica analyse across my codebase last week. The report flagged twelve functions, including four I would have sworn were clean.
The Double Trap
29 Jul 2026In The Comprehension Crisis, I argued that AI can quietly erode one of our most valuable engineering assets: deep technical understanding. In The Pull Request Trap, I looked at how traditional delivery workflows create queues that slow down learning and feedback.
Read more...hicurl: a modern HTTP CLI built with hica
26 Jul 2026I spend a lot of time testing HTTP endpoints, inspecting JSON responses, and composing API calls, whether writing automated BDD specs in choreo or probing APIs interactively in the terminal.
Read more...Exploratory Learning: Discovering hica via the REPL
21 Jul 2026The best way to learn a new programming language is to play with it. Reading documentation or scanning source files is fine, but you don’t really get a feel for the syntax and semantics until you start typing code and seeing what happens.
Read more...tbdflow-ui: a desktop dashboard built with hica
30 Jun 2026hica recently got initial package management, and I wanted to build something meaningful to put it to practise. I’ve added examples and working programs to the repo, but I wanted a real showcase using the imgui library. tbdflow was the obvious candidate.
Spec-Driven Development and the Return of Big Batch Thinking
22 Jun 2026Some are calling it “Spec-Driven Development.” Write a detailed specification for a large chunk of system functionality, hand it to an AI agent, and let it generate a working codebase. The argument is that shipping small, vertical slices (define a tiny piece, build it, get feedback, repeat) is too slow for the AI era.
Read more...Don't trust, instruct and verify
10 Jun 2026Generic LLMs are bad at niche programming languages. Ask one to write hica code and it invents syntax, uses functions that aren’t in the prelude, or produces Koka with the wrong variable names. It’s never seen hica, so it guesses from whatever looks closest.
Read more...Building a Lisp in hica
25 May 2026Version 0.29.3 of hica is out and the core is getting pretty stable. I wanted to explore whether hica could be used to write a small Lisp, as a way to stress-test the hica compiler: closures, recursive data structures, lexical scoping, higher-order functions.
Read more...Test-Driven Development with hica
20 May 2026hica has inline test blocks. They sit right next to your functions: no extra test files, no additional imports and no framework.
Run hica test and you’re done, that’s it!
Introducing hica: a language that transpiles to Koka
13 May 2026In my post about cloning ls in Koka I mentioned wanting to build a small language that transpiles to Koka. That idea has become hica!
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