Notes from the workshop

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

Writing runbooks a model can execute

We started letting an agent run the first pass of an incident runbook. It only works because we rewrote the runbooks first.

AI · 6 min

21 Apr 2026

Usability testing said the onboarding flow was clear. Real signups dropped off at a step nobody in the test session hit.

Quality · 6 min

20 Apr 2026

A shared database looks like an integration shortcut. It's usually a coupling nobody agreed to.

Engineering · 6 min

17 Apr 2026

Asking a coding agent to write out its plan first turned out to be a cheaper review step than reading the diff.

AI · 6 min

16 Apr 2026

Nobody scopes the support desk when they scope the product. It shows up as an emergency about six weeks after launch.

Process · 5 min

15 Apr 2026

The first run of a schema migration told us it would work. The second run, under production load, told us the truth.

Engineering · 6 min