Month in review: February 2026

UpdatedMarch 6, 2026

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Things that happened From a technical point of view, the main thing that happened in January is that I got access to Claude Code and have been playing around with that. I hope to write up my thoughts soon. Things I learnt I’ve published a number o...

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Things that happened I received a happy birthday message from our HR system. It gave me the same vibes as the AI-written compliments I mentioned in Month in review: May 2026. Microsoft ran an "AI sk

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Fixing a code analysis auto-fix which made acronyms less clear

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Things I learnt A HashSet is for storing unique elements. The point is that it has O(1) lookups like a Dictionary does. It uses the same basic mechanism as a Dictionary does (hashing objects then usi

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TIL how to find latitude and longitude of a geolocation stored in SQL Server

I was recently working with an EF Core entity which contained a C# Point property representing a geolocation. This was stored in a single column in a SQL Server database. (I think this uses NetTopolog

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Tim talks tech

82 posts

Things that happened

I've installed https://github.com/johncmunson/claude-code-transcripts which is handy for copying formatted content from Claude Code into Obsidian. (I installed this rather than Simon Willison's original version because I don't have python tooling installed.) I've used it a few times if I've wanted to copy something from the transcript and retain the formatting, and it's worked well so far.

The guy who has taken the lead on AI adoption at work was speaking to the whole company recently and I was really encouraged by some of what he was saying. It seems there is a bottom-up desire for transparency around when AI has been used, which I thought was a good sign of responsible usage. He was also quite positive about having varied adoption rates around the business, and happy for people to use AI as much or as little as they find helpful. I was glad of that attitude, as opposed to trying to push AI on people who don't find it useful. His emphasis was very much on making tools and training available to everyone, but leaving it up to individuals how helpful they find those tools while doing their work.

Things I learnt

I needed to update some data in a data model I wasn't familiar with. I used AI too much, and it took a long time to verify what AI produced. I ended up changing tack, and just using AI to find the relevant database tables. I then manually verified that no other tables were relevant by checking foreign keys, and manually worked out what the data change should be. It was definitely a case where using AI slowed things down.

Things I've been thinking about

With the coding agent space moving so quickly, there's always something new to try. It's impossible to keep on top of all the new developments. One impact of this is that the industry holds out the perpetual hope that salvation is just around the corner. Even if you hit frustrations actually using an agent for your work, a week later some new shiny thing will come out with the promise of making everything better. For example, I often vibe code user scripts (pieces of javascript which run in the browser when using a specified website, in order to customise its appearance or functionality). This is very hit–and–miss, presumably at least partly because the LLM agent has no way to verify whether the script is behaving as intended. Now there is a chrome extension for Claude which can be used by Claude Code to interact with the browser. This would probably make Claude better at this sort of work (although it also introduces security risks and I haven't yet read up on the mitigations which are in place, so I currently have no plans to install it). But it's another thing to install, another thing to try. It's yet another implicit message that the good stuff is just around the corner, and that even if you've found AI not to be useful you should try it again — and again, and again, and again, increasing your mental lock–in each time.

Things I haven't published

Most ideas I have for blog posts never see the light of day because I don't find the time to write them. Here's what I didn't get round to.

Finding undeployed changes

TIL how PasswordHasher handles salt

Giving Claude Code readonly access to a database

TIL why dictionary lookups are O(1)

Claude Code forking and rewinding

Month in review: February 2026

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Monthly reviews

Month in review: January 2026

More from this blog

Giving Claude Code a /goal

Month in review: June 2026

TIL capitalising letters with regex

Month in review: May 2026

TIL how to find latitude and longitude of a geolocation stored in SQL Server

Things that happened

Things I learnt

Things I've been thinking about

Things I've published

Things I haven't published

Command Palette

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Monthly reviews

Month in review: January 2026

More from this blog

Things that happened

Things I learnt

Things I've been thinking about

Things I've published

Things I haven't published