Architecture Is a Story About Trust
Every boundary in a system is a statement about which team you trust to not break you.
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The Workbench
A workbench of half-built ideas, finished arguments, and notes to myself — kept in the open.
Recently
Leaving the Big Company, Slowly
Notes on building something of your own without a dramatic exit, and why the slow version might be better.
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.
The Review Is the Work
When generation is free, the scarce resource is judgement. That reframes what a senior engineer is for.
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.
What Agents Still Cannot Do
An honest list, kept up to date, of where the end-to-end agentic workflow still falls over.
AGENTS.md is the new README
The README was written for a human who would skim it once. This file is read in full, every run.
Building in public without a megaphone
Wondering whether it is possible to build something of your own quietly, and whether that defeats the point.
The context window is a budget, not a container
Half-formed thought on why "just paste more" stops working past a certain repo size.
I stopped drawing sequence diagrams first
Trying to articulate why starting with the failure modes produces a better design than starting with the happy path.
Kafka consumers I have regretted
A catalogue of my own mistakes, kept partly as penance and partly as a checklist.
Essays
Finished arguments. Long, opinionated, meant to change your mind. 9 entries
Notes
Thinking out loud. Unfinished, exploratory, often wrong. 8 entries
Playbooks
Repeatable decisions. Problem, context, approach, tradeoffs. 6 entries
Signals
A link and why it matters. Two sentences, no more. 6 entries