Pioneering

Notes from active builds: the design decisions, war stories and how-it-works of whatever I'm making right now.

A wedding photo culler that contains no machine learning at all, by deliberate choice. Blur, exposure and eyes, done with plain arithmetic.

A tool-failure log dumped a wall of Go stack frames where one line would have done. What a log record owes the person reading it.

Reviewing a scaffolder turned up a command name that quietly conflated two different things. A flag and a setting are not the same object.

An AI repair agent declared success the moment the code compiled. The linter disagreed, and the gap between those two is the whole story.

An audit found that a Cobra option had never been enabled, so the root command hooks had silently not run on any subcommand for months.

A generated nested command would not compile, and the cause was a scaffolder handing every call the same key regardless of depth.

Building an AI dungeon master to test a Go chat client, and the bug that kept resurrecting a goblin the player had definitively killed.

Generate an asymmetric RSA-4096 signing key inside AWS KMS with no export path, then sign releases by calling kms:Sign instead of holding the key.

A checksum proves the bytes match the manifest, but says nothing about who wrote the manifest. Why self-update needs a signature instead.

Three traps release-plz sets for a Rust workspace, starting with a default tag template that collides the moment you have more than one crate.