Notes from the workshop

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

Estimating a fixed-price project when scope includes a model

Fixed-price quoting assumes effort is the main variable. A model-backed feature adds a second one that behaves nothing like effort.

ProcessAIDelivery

Process · 6 min

10 Mar 2026

The permissions bug that only showed up on the second account

Every permissions defect we've caught late in a project shares a cause: the test data only ever had one user of each type.

TestingQualityEngineering

Quality · 5 min

09 Mar 2026

Why we time-box agent sessions

Long, meandering sessions with a coding agent degrade in a specific, predictable way. Cutting them short fixed more than it seemed like it should.

AIClaudeEngineering

AI · 5 min

06 Mar 2026

A SaaS dashboard that had too many charts

A build note on removing two-thirds of a client's analytics dashboard and getting thanked for it.

Case studyProductEngineering

Case notes · 6 min

05 Mar 2026

The guardrails we put around every model call

A short, unglamorous list of the checks that sit between a model's output and anything a user or another system relies on.

AIEngineeringQuality

AI · 6 min

04 Mar 2026

Load testing a marketplace before its first big sale

A build note on preparing a growing marketplace for a promotional event with ten times its normal traffic, and the one dependency that nearly didn't survive it.

Case studyEngineeringTesting

Case notes · 6 min