Writing

Note · Agentic engineering

A confidence score written in prose is decoration. A typed verdict with a calibrated number can stop a pipeline. The difference is who consumes it.

Note · Agentic engineering

Knowing the right process and following it under deadline are different skills. One of them can be automated.

Note · Practice

If a design decision lives in more than one file, it is not a decision yet. It is a coincidence waiting to drift.

Note · Agentic engineering

The scariest findings were not crashes or wrong numbers. They were correct-looking actions performed by the wrong person.

Note · Agentic engineering

Seven in ten commits came from an agent. Zero in ten decisions about what "correct" means for the business did.

Note · Infrastructure

Every stage of my pipeline vouched for itself and nobody vouched for the result. The first real run of the fix caught ten days of deploys that had gone nowhere.

Note · Next.js

Configuration is a list of claims, and nothing checks claims by default. Two failures with the same shape: declared but never delivered.

Note · Practice

Green is not evidence. It is the absence of evidence. A running gallery of production failures that passed every check that existed.

Note · Infrastructure

A production pilot on one desktop machine, zero hosting bill, real TLS and a hidden origin. What that buys, and what it honestly costs.

Note · Practice

One unbacked claim is not one bad item in a list. It is a discount applied to the whole list.

Note · Next.js

A shared "render everything through Link" abstraction is a trap the moment one item is off-origin. The click is intercepted and then nothing happens at all.

Note · Infrastructure

Every trailing-slash redirect was downgrading visitors from HTTPS to plain HTTP. Browsers follow that without a word, so nothing ever looked broken.

Note · Infrastructure

A push-to-live loop with no SSH step, and the two footguns that each cost me a debugging session. Both failed invisibly from the outside.

Note · Agentic engineering

Parity bugs are exactly what humans skim and agents grind through. The most valuable finding was the fix a human had to revert.

Note · Agentic engineering

Agents forget between sessions. The repo does not. Every regression a reviewer catches becomes a constraint the next session starts with.

Note · Next.js

Every project page on my portfolio rendered a 404 for months while returning HTTP 200. On this bug class, "it builds and the page loads" is what failure looks like.

Note · Agentic engineering

The productivity is not in agents typing faster. It is in never sitting idle while something runs.

Note · Agentic engineering

One day of writing notes bought a 196-file MVP the next day, because the agent spent zero time guessing what I meant.

Article · Practice

I handed over systems I had run alone. The dangerous first week is not the one with no documentation, it is the one where someone acts confidently on a stale mental model. Here is the prompt I left, with the specifics stripped out so you can use it.

Article · Agentic engineering

Typesafe shipped a frontier model that returns a typed value and a calibrated confidence score instead of text. No parsing, no malformed JSON, no hallucinated enum member.

Article · Practice

The bugs that hurt in invoicing are never crashes. They are the ones where the system is confidently wrong.

Article · Agentic engineering

The lifecycle has not got shorter. It has got lopsided: cheap in the middle, expensive at both edges.

Article · Agentic engineering

AI did not replace developers. It replaced the boring parts. The rule that keeps you safe: if you cannot explain the code, do not ship it.

Article · Agentic engineering

Chain of Thought is the plan and Agent Teams is the execution. They are two layers of one system, not two techniques.

Article · Agentic engineering

Connecting one agent to N tools used to mean N one-off integrations. MCP is the interoperability layer that removes the multiplication.