The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
Git worktrees let you run agents in parallel, but every new worktree starts cold, fights over ports and leaves junk behind. Worktrunk wraps worktrees in a few simple commands and a hook system, so one config file gives the whole team warm, isolated environments that clean up after themselves.
Git worktrees let you run agents in parallel, but every new worktree starts cold, fights over ports and leaves junk behind. Worktrunk wraps worktrees in a few simple commands and a hook system, so one config file gives the whole team warm, isolated environments that clean up after themselves.
A startup ran out of runway and handled the layoff badly. The engineer found out from his broker. The argument here is that the company's real output was never the platform, it was the engineers it built, and no month of handover meetings can transfer that.
Server actions look like React compiler magic, but underneath they are a name mapped to a function behind one endpoint. You can build the same shape in Django, call it from React or a plain HTML form, and keep validation at the boundary.
MinIO deleted its community edition and pulled its Docker images, breaking every local and CI pipeline that used it to fake S3. Here is the four-step migration to RustFS on a Laravel stack, and why development dependencies deserve the same scrutiny as production ones.
AI has a confidence problem. Human intelligence was shaped by an uncertain world, and uncertainty is exactly the ingredient AI is missing.
Agents follow the patterns in the surrounding code more reliably than they follow your rules, so every inconsistent naming scheme and half-migrated architecture is a lesson you're teaching them. The fix isn't another rule file. It's deleting the bad example.
Two agents implemented and reviewed a full architecture refactor across five iterations, with zero lines of production code written by hand. What neither agent caught was four innocent lines in a coordinator that had quietly started making policy decisions.
The Android emulator was never the real cost. The setup was: SDK paths, JDK versions, licence acceptance, a hand-edited config file, repeated on every machine and every new joiner. Claude Desktop takes that off your hands, and the wait that's left is spent reading a plan, not a stack trace.
Codex got the same god class Claude had failed to remove, plus one thing Claude never had: a target architecture. An implementing agent and an independent reviewer then took three rounds to converge, because agents renovate around bad architecture rather than delete it.
A boolean feature flag starts a risky migration everywhere at once. Hashing a stable tenant ID into 100 buckets turns the flag into a dial that only ever widens, and the thresholds matter: percent-of-tenants is not percent-of-work.
Handing an AI your engineering conventions cleans up the code without fixing the architecture. A 5,000-line god class shrank to 500 lines across tidy domain files, and an independent reviewing agent still returned FAIL: authority never left the central object.
Becoming AI-native in three years does not need a three-year technology roadmap. It needs a usage policy, a map of your data, one bounded experiment, and both the enthusiasts and the sceptics in the room. Build the ability to change, not the overhaul.
Infrastructure documentation goes stale because it is a second thing to maintain. Terraform plus cloud discovery plus a few query tools describes the system better than any diagram, and leaves humans to document only the why behind the odd decisions.
Hitting a wall with AI usually means hitting the wall of the chat box, not the wall of AI itself. Give a model memory, tool access and a browser, and the interfaces we built for humans become the integration. The bottleneck stops being the model and starts being your imagination.
Sentry silently drops transactions that blow past its span and payload limits, so the heaviest background jobs are exactly the ones missing from your dashboard. Capping span count and truncating span descriptions on bytes brings them back.
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