Notes from the workshop

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

The week we turned down more scope than we took

A client asked for eight new features on top of a stable product. We recommended two. The conversation that got us there is worth writing down.

ProcessScopingClients

Process · 6 min

20 Feb 2026

Testing an AI feature you cannot fully predict

You cannot write a fixed expected output for a feature whose whole point is that the output varies. Here is what we assert instead.

TestingAIQuality

Quality · 7 min

19 Feb 2026

The fleet client's favourite feature was a filter

Six months into a platform build, the most-used feature turned out to be the smallest one, and it explained something about how the whole product should have been scoped.

Case studyProductScoping

Case notes · 6 min

18 Feb 2026

Why we still write runbooks by hand

We generate a great deal of documentation now. The one document we insist a human writes from scratch is the one you read at 3am.

EngineeringProcessQuality

Engineering · 5 min

17 Feb 2026

The agent that refactored more than it was asked to

A coding agent tidied a file while fixing a bug in it. The fix was correct. The tidying broke a test suite nobody thought to check.

AIClaudeQuality

AI · 6 min

16 Feb 2026

We timed our own releases for a month

Not the build, not the deploy — the whole path from a merged pull request to a person confirming the change worked. The slow part was not where we expected.

ProcessDeliveryEngineering

Process · 6 min