Article on Brett Smith

Chasing that Flow State

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Geoffrey Huntley’s post on X about how addictive coding with AI is 100% true. The flow state is highly addictive. Before using LLM’s, when I would be working on a bug, I didn’t want any distractions. I would wait until I knew I had a block of time to solve it, which inevitably led to procrastination because I couldn’t find the “perfect time”. It would take so much effort to enter that flow state, but once I did, it felt incredible. I think that’s what we are all chasing when we fall in love with coding. The flow state.

Building FullStackBrett

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 16:37:50 -0700

Hey there! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Create a personal site for a blog, that is. I have had multiple false starts over the years. Hopefully this isn’t a continuation of the pattern. What has motivated me is a desire to have better notes about the things I am learning. It is a crazy time in the life of software engineers with AI sweeping across the industry. I want to have a low stakes place to record my thoughts, and in the process maybe provide someone else with a few useful ideas too.

Can anyone build an AI Agent from scratch?

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been following Thorsten Ball for a while now and recently discovered his YouTube series with SourceGraph, where he’s working on an AI Agent called Amp . Thorsten did something unique: he shared a video of himself pair programming on the actual SourceGraph product, walking through his thought process for building the agent. It wasn’t a polished video with fancy editing or transitions—just an authentic look at him coding. While watching, I realized this wasn’t some insanely complex technical feat. Even someone like me could give it a shot (famous last words, I know). Inspired, I started building my own AI agent as a VSCode extension. A few days in, I’m hooked and can’t stop working on it.

The $4 Server

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

When I discovered Virtual Private Servers (VPS) were only $4 I had to find out if it really was possible to quickly and easily host projects for cheap instead of paying services like Vercel to do it. Turns out, it’s not that bad… Only if you have a step by step instruction manual on how to do it.

This is a compilation of those instructions that I have been using to host fullstackbrett .