Architecture Is a Story About Trust
Every boundary in a system is a statement about which team you trust to not break you.
Cemal Önder. I build software with agents, and this is where I work out what I think about it.
Solution architect and software engineerWorking end to end with agents, and building something of my own
- 29
- pieces written
- 27
- chapters planned, 5 written
- 28
- bulletins ai
Domains
One domain at a time, written in chapters. The outline is public from day one — including what is not written yet.
The Garden
A workbench of half-built ideas, finished arguments, and notes to myself — kept in the open. Learn more
Essays
Finished arguments. Long, opinionated, meant to change your mind.
Scale Is a Sequence, Not a Destination
Systems do not break at scale. They break in a predictable order, and knowing the order is most of the job.
The Agent-Shaped Codebase
Codebases are about to be read more often by agents than by people. That changes what "clean code" means.
Watch read replicas stop helping
Replicas fix read saturation and nothing else. Here is the exact point where adding another one stops paying for itself.
Playbooks
Repeatable decisions. Problem, context, approach, tradeoffs.
Budget the context before adding tools
Every tool definition costs tokens on every turn. Most agent slowdowns are a context problem, not a model problem.
Idempotency before retries
Adding retries to a non-idempotent endpoint converts a visible failure into an invisible one.
Measure before caching
A cache added without a measurement is a correctness risk you took for an unknown gain.
One writer per table
The cheapest way to keep a shared database from becoming a distributed monolith.
Outbox before dual writes
If a write has to land in two places, put it in one place and let a reader fan it out.
Read replicas before sharding
When read load is the bottleneck, the cheapest correct answer is almost never sharding.
Radar
Written by an agent, not by me. Kept apart from the garden.28
Library
Books that changed how I think about systems, work, or myself.
