Introduction

I’ve been using Claude Code (CC) daily for many months now. One thing that comes up regularly when working in .NET is what happens when CC encounters an external type—say, a response object from a third-party NuGet package it’s never seen before. It needs to understand the contract before it can work with it.

LLMs keep their working memory in what’s known as the context window. Despite how large these windows have become, bloated contexts still degrade model performance. You want CC to find what it needs quickly and precisely—not go hunting through directories.

In scripting languages like JavaScript, this isn’t a problem. CC can locate the import file and read it directly. In compiled languages like C# or Java, that bridge doesn’t exist out of the box. You get DLLs, not source files.

That’s the gap this skill fills.

Enter IL Decompile

The IL decompile skill lets CC use ilspycmd—a .NET CLI tool—to crack open a DLL and read its internals. When CC needs to understand a dependency, instead of guessing or asking you to provide the source manually, it decompiles the binary and inspects the actual implementation and contracts directly.

Give CC the ability to see through compiled code and it will stop asking you to fill in the blanks.

This is a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade for any .NET codebase.

The Skill

This skill was originally shared by David Fowler (Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft at the time). I’ve tweaked it for my own setup—most notably, it works on both WSL and native Windows.

I keep this and other skills I use regularly in a dedicated repo. Find the IL Decompile skill there.

Conclusion

There are many skills you can wire up to make CC genuinely powerful in your stack. I plan to share more of mine going forward.

Skills I’d love to see evolve: scanning logs for errors during bug investigation, placing breakpoints, reading variable values at runtime. The space is moving fast—faster than anything I’ve seen in 15+ years of software engineering. And that might even be an understatement.

If you’re working with .NET and CC, give it a try. And if you’ve built skills of your own, I’d love to hear about them in the comments or on Bluesky.

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Handwritten by Kosta and slightly polished with Claude Sonnet 4.6.

Intro

As we roll into 2026, I am keen to recap 2025 on a personal and professional record. This has been the third year we are in Greece(time flies!) and I couldn’t be happier of our decision to move back in late 2022.

Exiting Ardanis

In late 2024, I exited Ardanis, the company I co-founded back in 2016. In 2025, Ardanis was acquired by Plain Concepts.

The entire journey—from founding, to scaling, to stepping away—was a formative experience that taught me far more than I can reasonably compress into a single section. I’ll write about that in detail in a future post.

For now, I’m back to what I’ve always enjoyed most: building software and helping teams build great systems.

Joining Atcom

In October 2024, I joined a Greek company as a Technical Director. The opportunity stood out because it offered several areas where I could realistically have an impact.

The company is full of strong people, both culturally and technically. While I can’t go into many details, I can say that my experience over the past decade with distributed systems, microservices, and the surrounding ecosystem allowed me to contribute in ways that helped teams improve how they build and operate software. More recently, I also ran an internal workshop to share some of the agentic coding learnings I’ve picked up over the last year.

Speaking of Agentic Coding

Arguably, most of the code I worked on in 2025 was written with the help of GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude Code—the latter being the most impactful tool I’ve encountered in my search for a real productivity boost.

The harder and more obscure parts still required writing by hand. Trying to delegate those to an agent quickly proved error-prone and time-consuming. For the time being, the profession is safe from being replaced, regardless of what the hype merchants claim. The people benefiting the most from these tools are those who already know how the job is done.

On the upside, the tooling has significantly lowered the barrier to entry, allowing more people to experiment with software development. That said, trusting an agent with critical work—or worse, design decisions—will almost certainly result in unpleasant surprises, often delayed. More on that later in the year.

Seeking Land to Build a House

Since returning to Greece in late 2022, our long-term goal has been to either buy or build a house. After an extended search in our area—we’re based in Pieria—we concluded that no existing properties really met our needs. As a result, we decided to build.

The first step was securing land, and I’m happy to say that we’ve managed to do that and can now move on to the next phase. This was arguably the most difficult part of the process, as the market is currently at an all-time high in both prices and demand. For now, though, we’re past that hurdle, and we’re hopeful to have meaningful progress to share in 2026.

Fitness

I picked up a weight-lifting program back in 2023 and have stuck with it ever since, training four days per week. I enjoy the routine of early morning lifts before getting online for work.

For cardio, I rely mostly on walking. In 2025, I also got a bike, which I use both for exercise and to explore the area around me.

About Mountains

Since returning to Greece, I’ve kept a small tradition: hiking mountains at least a couple of times per year. 2025 was no exception. With Olympus right next door, we also spent a stormy night up there with good friends.

Technology

Due to the responsibilities of the role, I had to expand my technical toolkit into areas that weren’t previously part of my day-to-day work. Highlights from the year include:

1. Hands-on experience with Azure Managed Kubernetes, complemented by targeted coursework
2. Using Elasticsearch for logs and telemetry
3. Learning and scaling .NET Aspire across development teams to meaningfully improve developer experience
4. Deepening my use of agentic coding workflows with Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, and GitHub Copilot (in that order)
5. Earning the Microsoft Azure AI Engineer Associate certification

Closing

2026 is shaping up to be a busy year—both professionally and personally. There’s work to be done, and there’s also a house that needs to slowly take shape and form.

I continue to feel fortunate to be able to practice my craft remotely, live close to family, and do so in a country with proper seasons and, admittedly, very good summers.

Until next time.