Tidy design principles
Hadley WickhamSemi-regular discussions of best practices of programming in R
| Platform |  | Pricing | Only free issues | Publishes | Weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 13 | Founded | 3 years ago | Last Issue | 6 days ago |
| Active | |||||
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tidydesign.substack.comLatest Issues
Help! My coding agent can run code
Last week we talked briefly about how you can make tools safer when they’re tightly scoped. This week I’m going to discuss why this approach doesn’t generalise and what you can do instead.
Tightly scoped tools
Last week we introduced t...
A coding agent is six functions in a trenchcoat
Coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex have taken the software engineering field by storm. Since November 2025 they have radically changed the practice of software development for many programmers (including me), and in this week...
Your LLM can’t math (and that’s ok)
Last week we precisely defined an agent: an LLM, in a harness, that calls tools repeatedly in a loop. Most agents have two types of tools: read tools that can observe the world, and write tools that can change the world.
But my definition...
What is an agent?
I thought it might be useful to talk about what exactly an agent is, because there’s a lot of mystery hiding behind a fairly straightforward idea. Once you understand that idea, you’ll better understand how tools like Claude Code work and s...
Returning to life!
Welcome back to the tidy design principles substack. I’m bringing it back to life to talk about what I’m thinking most about these days: AI. There are so many voices talking about AI, and I feel ambivalent about adding one more. And frankly...
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R, data, \ud83d\udc15, \ud83c\udf78, \ud83c\udf08. He/him.
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