I'm Charles Edmonds, a software developer with more than 25 years of commercial programming experience.

I build software, development tools, and AI-related products across multiple languages and stacks. A lot of my work lives at the intersection of old and new systems, which means I spend a lot of time solving real problems where reliability matters more than hype.

I am less interested in AI as spectacle than in AI as a tool you can actually trust in the middle of real work.

I use AI every day for actual work. Not demos. Not toy projects. Real code, commercial products, documentation, analysis, and problem solving across both legacy and modern environments.

Over the past two years, I have worked intensively to develop ways of using AI that are useful, repeatable, and grounded in real output. Along the way, I have also seen where AI goes wrong, where it misleads, and where the popular story about it breaks down in practice. That experience is what shapes everything on this site.

That is why Ask Good Questions exists.

A lot of people are trying to use AI seriously, but they have never been given a clear framework for doing it well. They are told to write better prompts, but not how to think clearly, structure the work, manage context, or stay accountable for the result.

That is the thread running through everything here.

Better questions produce better results. Everything on this site follows from that.

The guides are the lessons. The field notes are the lived side of those lessons. Many of them are drawn from the same thinking and working methods behind my upcoming book, Real Programmers Use AI.

The Book

I am currently working on Real Programmers Use AI, the first in a series of practical books about using AI as a serious tool without giving up your voice, your judgment, or your responsibility for the work.

You can follow the book at realpeopleuseai.com.

---

If you want to follow along as the work develops, you can subscribe here to get new guides and field notes by email.