Practical research and field notes for people building modern software.
Architecture, implementation patterns, testing and the parts of software development that still matter when generating code becomes cheap.
The Hidden Engineering Behind Role-Based Permissions
\"Add admin and member roles\" is a small requirement with a surprisingly large behavioural surface.
You Can Ask Claude to Build It. The Question Is Why You Should Have To.
Code is getting cheaper. Your time is not.
Cal.com and Rallly were not written with us in mind. Here is what each one forced us to change.
A census of the failure surface, taken from a capability that has been built rather than imagined.
Libraries reuse code. Coding agents may let us reuse something larger: complete implementation knowledge.
The useful question is not whether the agent wrote code. It is what evidence makes the code safe to ship.
Prompts express intent. Production capabilities need behaviour, constraints and proof.
Cal.com and Rallly were not written with us in mind. Here is what each one forced us to change.
Seeing an event and successfully applying an event are two different states.
A census of the failure surface, taken from a capability that has been built rather than imagined.
A progress report with the real counter, four bugs that only appear under concurrency, and the parts that are not built yet.
Stripe gives you excellent billing primitives. Your application still owns the behaviour around them.
Probably not — if you're still testing whether anyone wants your product.
Coding agents add a new option to an old software decision.
The happy path is increasingly cheap. Production readiness lives in everything around it.
