justadev

Thoughts

Short essays on lessons I paid for. Each one starts from a real incident in my own records and ends on a rule you can use.

Point at a bottle to pull its cork.Tap a bottle to read its message.

  1. A green test suite is a rumourTests tell you what code does when it is called. Only the live system tells you whether anything calls it.3 min read
  2. I fired 31 agents over $52.78Cheapest lesson I ever bought. A loop that spends money on its own is a trust problem, not a rounding error.3 min read
  3. My agents never touch gitAn agent ran one ordinary command and erased 475 rows of live data. The fix was not a better prompt.3 min read
  4. Ask what the user sees before you auditFive audit rounds across three models found 12 real bugs. None of them was the one I reported.3 min read
  5. The orchestrator's job is to distrustOne night twelve agent tasks merged with green tests. Twelve of twelve needed a fix.3 min read
  6. Slop has a smellA demo that only looks like software is a defect, not a deliverable. This is how I learned to tell the difference.3 min read