Notes from the workshop

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

Keeping a decision log nobody has time to read yet

The value of writing down why a decision was made shows up months later, for a reader who does not exist yet. That makes it easy to skip and expensive to have skipped.

ProcessDeliveryEngineering

Process · 5 min

27 May 2026

An audit of someone else's AI feature

We were brought in to review a model-backed feature another team had shipped. The problems were mundane and entirely avoidable, which is the useful part.

AICase studyQuality

Case notes · 6 min

26 May 2026

The difference between a demo and a review-worthy build

A feature that demos well and a feature that is ready for review are not the same claim, and conflating them is where a lot of late-stage schedule slippage comes from.

ProcessDeliveryQuality

Process · 5 min

25 May 2026

The migration we ran in the background for a month

Moving a client's core table to a new schema without a maintenance window meant running two versions of the truth side by side, on purpose, for weeks.

EngineeringArchitectureData

Engineering · 6 min

22 May 2026

What we tell junior engineers about using agents

The advice we give new engineers about coding agents is almost the opposite of the advice that helps senior engineers, and conflating the two has caused real damage.

AIEngineeringProcess

AI · 6 min

21 May 2026

Reading error logs as a design document

The most honest description of how a system is actually used is its error log, not its specification. We started treating it that way.

EngineeringQualityData

Engineering · 5 min