Code Review
When I review a pull request I read the error handling before I read the feature. It is an odd order and it occasionally annoys people, but it comes from a simple observation: almost every incident I have been part of was an error path that had never been executed
AI
Green CI, clean review, broken production. The gap is that tests check whether code matches the implementation and production checks whether it matches reality.
AI
After reviewing a lot of agent generated pull requests, the same six failure patterns keep appearing. They share a structure: locally plausible, globally wrong.
Engineering Culture
They are genuinely useful and every one you leave in place multiplies the number of code paths nobody tests. Here is how to keep the benefit.
AI
You cannot assert equality on a model response. You can assert a lot of other things, and most teams assert none of them.
AI
It was sharp for an hour and now it is contradicting itself and reintroducing bugs you already fixed. That is context degradation, and it is manageable.
AI
An honest inventory after a year of daily use: what earns its place in the loop, what I stopped opening, and where these tools are still bad.
AI
Large diffs used to signal that somebody worked hard. Now they signal that a prompt was short. Review has to change shape.
AI
Most agent instruction files are a list of vibes. Here is what belongs in one, based on which rules measurably changed the output.