Notes from the workshop

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

Pairing a junior engineer with an agent, not instead of one

The worry was that coding agents would remove the reason to hire junior engineers. Six months in, the opposite problem showed up instead.

AIClaudeProcess

AI · 6 min

24 Feb 2026

Logging enough to answer the question you haven't asked yet

Most logging decisions are made to answer today's question. The expensive incidents are the ones where the log needed to answer a question nobody had thought of yet.

EngineeringQualityArchitecture

Engineering · 6 min

23 Feb 2026

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