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I'm Kamal, a French engineer working in tech since 2011, currently VP of Engineering at Intersec. I curate articles on engineering organizations, systems and tooling, and the impact of LLMs.

Iterating towards simplicity

As a child I took apart all kinds of electronic devices to see how they worked, or to try to fix them. I approached self-hosting with the same curiosity. It became a way to understand how web applications run and discover many great open-source projects. I started my self-hosting journey with Plex directly on my OS. It runs without a reverse proxy or a TLS certificate. Since then, I have learned about the benefits of containers, how to write a Nginx configuration and how to use Certbot for a TLS certificate. What I want to share here though, is how I achieved a consistent and fairly simple setup through my experiments.

2026-02-21

Is this blog just more AI slop?

I tried reading Hypnocracy, which was written with an LLM. The book hallucinates about the “Berlin experiment” at the beginning, but never explains what it is. I looked it up, and this experiment doesn't appear to exist. I gave up after the first chapter because the book reads like a prompt response.

Seeing how bad it can get, can I use AI to write this blog? It's tempting to use an LLM to instantly produce polished content. And while I'm using AI tools in my writing process, I don't want my blog to resemble a collection of AI-generated posts.

2026-02-06

Mitchell Hashimoto's Journey with AI Tools

Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty and a longtime developer tool builder, shares his experience coding with AI in My AI Adoption Journey. He offers a refreshing perspective, being neither a proponent nor a detractor of AI. His approach mirrors my own experience:

I use AI tools to maintain momentum when I'm tired or have low mental energy.
I use them for research grunt work which can feel tedious, like comparing frameworks trade-offs, summarizing papers or digging through documentation.
I use them to overcome writer's block, when getting started on blog posts including this one.

2026-01-31

Sensible defaults

After using the same tools for over ten years (Gnome terminal running tmux with Vim), I decided to try more modern ones. However, the cost of change can be high. This is why I appreciate tools with sensible, deliberate defaults. I can start using them right away, and tweak the settings later.

Ghostty

I switched from Gnome Terminal to Ghostty and I immediately adopted it. It's very responsive and it has useful features. Here are some that come out of the box:

System clipboard integration that just works
JetBrains Mono with built-in Nerd Fonts support, including ligatures and many icons