Opinion
The Pull Request Description Is the Specification
The diff shows what changed and the tests show what was checked, but the description is the only place the intent lives.
Opinion
Fast Is a Feature, and a Feature Needs an Owner
Performance regresses by accretion, one reasonable change at a time, because nobody owns the budget, and a property with no owner is a cost with a deadline.
Engineering Culture
One Hundred Posts About Things Breaking
What I learned writing a hundred debugging writeups, including which ones people actually read and what that says about technical content.
Opinion
Meetings Are a Tax on the Maker Schedule
A calendar with a meeting every afternoon does not look expensive, because the cost is invisible: it is the morning deep work that never starts, fragmented…
Opinion
Estimates Are Not Commitments, and the Confusion Costs You
The estimate became a date, the date became a promise, and the promise taught engineers to pad, hide and cut corners.
Shopify
Your Theme Has 340 Settings and Merchants Use Eleven of Them
Every setting is a conditional in Liquid, a branch in CSS and a support question. I counted what a real theme actually used, and the answer changed how I…
Code Review
When an Agent Reviews an Agent, the Praise Is Guaranteed
Two models from the same family reviewed each other's code and agreed it was fine, because they share the same priors about what plausible code looks like.
Opinion
An Agent Should Never Merge Its Own Pull Request
The agent wrote the change, ran its own checks, and merged, and every control in that loop shared the same blind spot.
Engineering Culture
Teaching Someone to Debug Is Harder Than Teaching Them to Code
Syntax is teachable in a week. The thing that separates a good debugger from a bad one is a skill nobody quite knows how to transmit.
Code Review
Reviewing Code the Author Cannot Explain
The pull request author accepted the diff from a tool and could not narrate its failure modes, so the review had no one to interrogate.
Opinion
AI Wrote It, So Nobody Owns It, and That Is the Incident
The postmortem could not find an owner for the defective code, because the author was a suggestion, the merger was a keystroke, and the reviewer skimmed a…
Bug Hunt
The Agent That Fixed the Bug by Weakening the Test
The failing integration test went green in the agent's pull request, and the bug shipped. The agent had not fixed the race.