Topic archive

Playbook

8 published stories filed under Playbook.

Pen-and-ink sketch of a small clockwork robot working at a tool-covered workbench late at night while a human sleeps peacefully on a couch in the background, a wall clock reading 2:00 above

ai April 24, 2026 13 min read

The Agent Stays Up Late, Not Me

Every senior engineer knows the right way to set up a codebase. None of them do it. Here’s the four-stage framework we use — The Ratchet — to take a vibe-coded project all the way to a thing you’d trust in production, and the punchline about why this only just became worth doing.

Most teams have always known they should be running tests, type-checking, security audits, accessibility checks, dead-code analysis, prose linting, and a coverage floor. Most teams run two of those. Here’s why that math has finally inverted, and the four-stage framework we use to ratchet a vibe-coded project to a hardened one.

Keith Pattison

Founder, Black Flag Design

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Pen-and-ink sketch of two keys on a ring with paper labels AI STUDIO and VERTEX, a thin red arrow pointing at the VERTEX key

ai April 24, 2026 4 min read

Two Kinds of Google Keys, Two Endpoints

The Gemini key that rejects your request with 403 API_KEY_SERVICE_BLOCKED is almost certainly a Vertex key being sent to the AI Studio endpoint. Here is how to tell them apart, and which endpoint to use.

We spent an hour chasing what looked like a billing issue and turned out to be a key-format mismatch. The key worked. Google was just telling us we had pointed it at the wrong building. If you are shipping a Gemini integration, this is the one-page reference we wish we had read first.

Keith Pattison

Founder, Black Flag Design

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ai April 24, 2026 5 min read

Design Tokens as Prompt Anchors

When you hand a generative image model an adjective, it drifts. When you hand it your design-system tokens by exact hex, it stops drifting. The discipline we found after shipping it wrong once.

We shipped the first cut of our CMS image generator with preset language like "hand-drawn whiteboard sketch" and "muted red accent." The output was childish chalkboard stick figures — nothing like the pen-and-ink illustrations already on our blog. The fix was not a better adjective. It was the same move you use everywhere else in design: stop naming things with vibes, start naming things with tokens.

Eli Wood

CEO, Black Flag Design

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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: a small figure inside a laptop types while arrows connect out to a code file, a terminal, and a git branch.

claude code April 23, 2026 7 min read

Explaining Claude Code to a Non-Technical Audience

What Claude Code actually is, why it changes how work gets done, and where it fits in a business (and where it doesn't).

If your engineers keep mentioning Claude Code and the name alone does not tell you much, this is the plain-English explanation. What it is, why it is different from a chatbot, and where it actually fits.

Eli Wood

CEO, 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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Black Flag Journal

ai April 20, 2026 5 min read

Six Principles for Shipping Reliable Software with AI

How we stay sane while "vibes" infiltrate codebases — the playbook we run on every engagement.

AI-generated code floods projects with promises of speed and delivers drift instead. Six disciplines turn it back into a reliable tool: small scope, human judgment, repeated purpose, weekly planning, active management, and continuous improvement.

Keith Pattison

Founder, Black Flag Design

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Black Flag Journal

playbook April 20, 2026 6 min read

The Black Flag Playbook: Six Principles for Shipping with AI

Battle-tested principles for teams building real software with AI-generated code. Human judgment, tight scope, and weekly evidence — the disciplines that keep AI-built systems reliable.

The six rules we use to ship production software with AI. Small scope, weekly demos, human-led oversight, and continuous improvement — drawn from six months of real client engagements.

Keith Pattison

Founder, Black Flag Design

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