Notes from the workshop

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

The week we spent only on error messages

A client asked why support tickets kept arriving for problems the system already knew about. The answer was in the error copy nobody had reviewed in two years.

Case studyProductQuality

Case notes · 6 min

12 Jun 2026

Acceptance criteria a tester can disagree with

Criteria written to be satisfied are less useful than criteria written to be argued about. The distinction shows up the first time someone tries to break them.

TestingQualityProcess

Quality · 5 min

11 Jun 2026

Running two coding agents on the same codebase

We tried assigning parallel tickets to two agents at once on the same repository. The bottleneck was not the agents, it was the branch strategy.

AIEngineeringDelivery

AI · 6 min

10 Jun 2026

Build note: a permissions model that outgrew its first design

A simple role-based system worked for a year, then a client asked for an exception that broke the model. What we replaced it with, and why we waited.

Case studyArchitectureEngineering

Case notes · 7 min

09 Jun 2026

The cost of a flaky test suite

A test that fails intermittently is worse than no test at all, because it trains the team to ignore red. We put a number on what that costs.

TestingQualityEngineering

Quality · 6 min

08 Jun 2026

How an agent changed our onboarding week

New engineers used to spend their first week reading. We rebuilt the week around a coding agent as a guided tour of the codebase, with mixed but useful results.

AIProcessEngineering

AI · 6 min