Topic archive

Developer Experience

5 published stories filed under Developer Experience.

Terminal-output panel showing two red FAIL lines and a green PASS line, with an arrow pointing from red to green

ai April 24, 2026 6 min read

Red/Green TDD When Your Dep Is a Generative API

How to test-drive code that integrates with Gemini, Claude, or any non-deterministic API — without pretending the API is deterministic.

Gemini does not care about your unit tests. But your unit tests can still be green, fast, and trustworthy — if you put the seam between your code and Gemini in the right place. Here is the pattern we used to ship a CMS image-generation feature in under a day, with every layer TDD'd and the Gemini boundary mocked without hand-waving.

Keith Pattison

Founder, Black Flag Design

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Whiteboard sketch: three doors of different sizes, one person, a small team, and a whole crowd each finding a way in.

claude code April 23, 2026 6 min read

How to Access Claude Code in Your Organization

Starter paths from a solo developer trying it over lunch to a full company rollout with billing, auth, and audit in place.

Getting Claude Code into your team doesn't have to start with a committee. Here are the paths we've watched work, from a single dev with a free trial to a company-wide rollout with governance and audit, plus the first 30 days we'd actually run.

Eli Wood

CEO, Black Flag Design

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Whiteboard sketch: a toolbox with six distinct Claude Code harness tools, and a hand picking the right one for the job.

claude code April 23, 2026 6 min read

When to Use What: Choosing the Right Claude Code Harness for the Task

Hooks, skills, CLAUDE.md, MCPs, sub-agents, plan mode. A practical decision framework for picking the piece of the harness that actually earns its keep on the task in front of you.

Claude Code gives you six different ways to shape a session. Most teams reach for the wrong one and wonder why the loop feels slow. Here's how we decide, task by task, which piece of the harness is worth the setup cost.

Eli Wood

CEO, Black Flag Design

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Whiteboard sketch: a central skill card with arrows fanning out to three connected repos, showing a skill being shared across a studio.

claude code April 23, 2026 6 min read

How to Share Claude Code Skills Across Repos, Teams, and Clients

Skills are the new unit of institutional knowledge. Here's how we package, share, and govern them across a studio that runs on Claude Code.

Claude Code skills are reusable slash-command workflows. Once they exist, the question is who gets to use them: you, your team, your org, or a specific client. Here's the sharing model we run at Black Flag and the disciplines that keep it from rotting.

Eli Wood

CEO, Black Flag Design

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Black Flag Journal

claude code April 20, 2026 5 min read

What a Year of Claude Code Trails Tells You About Your Team

Claude Code leaves evidence — sessions, commits, PRs, review notes. Read it like a logbook and you'll find what devs actually need to know before they go deeper.

After a year of shipping with Claude Code across real client work, the signal isn't in any single session — it's in the trails. Here's what those trails told us about where Claude Code shines, where it drifts, and the habits devs should build before they lean in harder.

Eli Wood

CEO, Black Flag Design

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