Writing

Notes from the workbench.

Engineering notes — how things get built, what the AI experiments actually taught us, and what we killed. Less strategy, more code.

Jun 2026How little a website actually needsThis site ships one client component — a cookie banner — and 3.2KB of JavaScript. Everything else is static HTML rendered at build time. Here's what we cut and why.
Jun 2026What a ten-agent build actually looks likeWe ran a fleet of coding agents on a build. Three independent services genuinely got three days of work in one. The producer/consumer pairs burned tokens and got redone.
May 2026The 90-day kill switchWe had 12 experiments running and none of them shipped. Each still got the odd Friday hour, so nothing ever died. Here's the rule we added.
Apr 2026Prompt the model like an API, not an oracleOur invoice extractor demoed clean and broke twice a week in production. It was wrong maybe 4% of the time and nothing caught it. Here's the machinery we wrapped it in.
Mar 2026Deep-link everythingA user sent a colleague a link to the third tab of a settings page. It opened on tab one. We put every bookmarkable state in the URL after that.
Feb 2026N role screens are one templateWe got three dashboard mockups — admin, manager, viewer. The diff between them was five capabilities. They shipped as one component and one endpoint.
Jan 2026Grep before you design itWe designed a screen off the README and it assumed a permission that didn't exist. Now we grep the role model, routes, and base classes before sketching anything.
Dec 2025Every integration is a translation problemBy the sixth integration we had point-to-point glue between every pair of systems. Routing everything through one canonical order shape stopped the explosion.
Nov 2025The boring code that saves youFour invariants nobody demos: integer cents, idempotency keys, tenant_id on every query, validate at the boundary. Each one has a specific incident behind it.
Oct 2025Stop checking roles. Check capabilities.We grepped a payroll app and found `role === 'manager'` in 14 files. Every new role was an edit across all of them. Here's what we moved to.