Notes from the workshop

What we learned building things, written up while it was still fresh. No thought leadership, no listicles.

Voice agents and the hold music problem

An AI phone agent that answers instantly removes the one thing hold music was covering for: a human deciding what to do next.

AIEngineeringCase study

AI · 6 min

29 Apr 2026

What actually slows down a refactor

It's rarely the code that's hard to change. It's the tests that assume the old shape and the deploy that can't be done in stages.

EngineeringQuality

Engineering · 6 min

28 Apr 2026

The fixed-price quote nobody liked

We turned down a fixed price on a project with agent-assisted estimation built in, and the client was glad of it eight weeks later.

ProcessDeliveryClients

Process · 5 min

27 Apr 2026

Why we stopped trusting green CI on its own

A fully green pipeline told us a release was safe twice in a row when it wasn't. Both times the tests were passing and asserting the wrong thing.

TestingQualityEngineering

Quality · 6 min

24 Apr 2026

A taxi operator's book of exceptions

The interesting engineering in dispatch software isn't the happy path. It's the list of exceptions the operator has been handling by memory for a decade.

Case studyEngineeringScoping

Case notes · 6 min

23 Apr 2026

The real cost of a feature flag left in

Feature flags are cheap to add and expensive to forget. We counted how many were still live a year after their features shipped.

EngineeringQuality

Engineering · 5 min