Twenty-six against forty
I let the fleet run an estate-wide migration overnight with one instruction: don't merge. In the morning a single count told me something was missing, before I'd opened a diff.
Categories
18 pages
Leadership
The fortnight I spent yak shaving
Two weeks tuning a retrieval system, every day productive and the numbers still not good enough... so I finally went and read what other people had already built.
Nobody photographs the scaffolding
My R&D team's work only ever showed up in other people's numbers, so when delivery became the measure, they went. Making that work visible was my job.
The tech debt you can't fix alone
The engineering argument for paying down tech debt almost never won. What got it funded was a promise, and it tended to be my name on the promise.
Blameless doesn't mean nobody messed up
Blameless was meant to make it safe to tell the truth. Somewhere along the way it started to mean nobody did anything, and I'd quite like the first one back.
Fourteen projects, one head
Agents made the doing cheap. What fourteen sessions cost is walking into each one cold, and the one head doing the walking.
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.
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.
