Writing
11 posts · tagged architecture · oldest Mar 2025
DEX5 posts · 2026
- Six hundred lines or it does not shipA 2,313-line orchestrator with a 1,073-line function is maintainable by a human with an IDE and unmaintainable by an agent. The refactor whose acceptance criterion was an agent behaviour, the CI guard that enforced it — and the fact that the guard is red as I write this.agentsarchitecturerefactoring9 min
- I built a time machine, then deleted half of itFour timeline verbs, parallel variants in git worktrees, a record mode and five branch families. Two cleanup specs removed almost all of it — including, awkwardly, the feature whose existence justified the first round of deletions.gitproductarchitecture10 min
- Three counters, three answersOne Stop click produced a UI, a state file and a git history that disagreed with each other three different ways. None of them was wrong. The reconciliation point that should have caught it was a line in a spec that said "details TBD in implementation".agentsdebuggingarchitecture7 min
- Your test suite bills by the tokenTwenty minutes and real dollars to verify a two-line UI change. A pluggable agent backend, a mock that refuses to improvise, and checkpoint replay took it to sixty seconds and zero — plus an honest account of what the mock does not buy you.agentstestingarchitecture9 min
- Nine stages, nine amnesiacsDex builds a project unattended by making sure no agent ever remembers anything. State travels through the filesystem instead — which works beautifully for artifacts and catastrophically for decisions.agentsaiarchitecture11 min