Code Review
Reviewing a Migration on a 400 Million Row Table
A migration that is instant on a thousand row table can lock a production table for minutes at scale. Review for locking, backfill strategy and rollback…
Code Review
Reviewing Retry Logic Before It Becomes an Outage
A retry looks like resilience and behaves like a load generator. Every retry needs a budget, jitter and an answer to what happens if the first attempt…
AI
A Year of Debugging AI Generated Code
Twelve months of daily agent use, reviewed honestly. The failure modes that got better, the ones that did not, and the practices that stuck.
Code Review
The Formatting Only Pull Request That Changed Behaviour
Four thousand changed lines, all whitespace, and one moved operator. The reviewer skimmed it as formatting and approved it.
Code Review
Review the Error Path First, Because That Is Where It Will Break
Happy path code is reviewed carefully and error handling gets a glance. That is backwards. Here is the checklist I run on every catch block, every wrapped…
AI
Why AI Generated Code Passes Tests and Still Breaks Production
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
The Six Bugs AI Coding Agents Write Most Often
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
Feature Flags Are Technical Debt With a Good Excuse
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
Testing an LLM Feature When the Output Is Different Every Time
You cannot assert equality on a model response. You can assert a lot of other things, and most teams assert none of them.
AI
Why Your Coding Agent Got Worse Halfway Through the Session
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
The AI Development Tools I Actually Use, and the Ones I Dropped
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
How to Review a 900 Line AI Pull Request Without Losing Your Mind
Large diffs used to signal that somebody worked hard. Now they signal that a prompt was short. Review has to change shape.