Notes from the workshop

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

What a flaky test is actually telling you

Teams quarantine flaky tests to keep the pipeline green. Usually the flakiness is a smaller, cheaper version of a bug that will surface later in production.

TestingQualityEngineering

Quality · 6 min

01 May 2026

Reading the agent diff twice

A near-miss from a live project, and the process change that came out of reading the diff twice instead of once.

AIEngineeringQuality

AI · 6 min

30 Apr 2026

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