Which tests would you cut when the bill arrives?
The runner fleet cost $270 I didn't have, so it went off. The tests stayed on, and the savings came from everything I'd been paying for twice.
Categories
35 pages
Campfire
The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.
What happens when an AI burns out
A Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first.
Management was never a promotion
Management and engineering are two sides of the same coin, and far too many companies forget the engineering side has no cap.
Prove the bug before you fix it
A model handed a bug will hand you back a plausible fix and a green test suite in about a minute. That tells you almost nothing.
The bot couldn't answer it. Neither could I.
I read the question my support bot had fluffed, gave the correct answer off the top of my head, and was wrong. The docs had fooled the person who wrote them.
Check the code you're reading is current
I was a minute from filing a fix for a feature that had shipped the day before. The reason I had not noticed turned out to be a rule of my own, doing precisely what I told it to.
Three places a document can live
A spec, a how-to and a README walk into a repo. Only one of them should still be there in six months.
I went looking for the reason not to build it
The requirements were done and I hadn't written a line of code. So I spent a day trying to talk myself out of the whole thing.
Which one needs me next
A dozen agent sessions running at once is not a capacity problem. Working out which of them is stuck is, and the obvious way to find out is the wrong one.
Ready for human
I run a coding session per repository and they can't talk to each other. For a while the thing carrying messages between them was me, and I kept getting it wrong.
