Why we’ve stopped noticing the real improvement opportunity Since AI arrived, many people have mentioned that the bottleneck has shifted from coding to code review. This isn’t quite right, as coding wasn’t the bottleneck in the first place, and it’s...

Building a product is one job. Keeping it alive is a completely different job. Nobody warns you about the second one. Or they do, and you don't listen. I didn't listen. This post is my production outage lessons, learnt the expensive way. One backen...

An alert fires because a checkout service has started returning HTTP 500 errors. An AI SRE begins investigating. It needs to determine which service is failing, which version is deployed, whether anything changed recently, what the logs and traces s...

Your stomach drops. You typed git reset --hard, or deleted the wrong branch, or a rebase ended with half your commits missing. The log looks empty. Three days of work, gone. Take a breath. If you ever committed that work, it is almost certainly stil...

In my previous posthttps://tarek-elzoghby.hashnode.dev/each-fix-to-my-classification-prompt-exposed-the-next-problem, I wrote about the problems I found while defining the categories for an AI intake classifier. I left ambiguous and invalid for anoth...

Why we’ve stopped noticing the real improvement opportunity Since AI arrived, many people have mentioned that the bottleneck has shifted from coding to code review. This isn’t quite right, as coding wasn’t the bottleneck in the first place, and it’s...

Calendars, evidence, and the difference between done and stuck I expected my pear wine to spend two to three weeks in primary fermentation. It spent nineteen days. The yeast went in on September 23, and on October 12 I siphoned the wine off its sed...

Why we’ve stopped noticing the real improvement opportunity Since AI arrived, many people have mentioned that the bottleneck has shifted from coding to code review. This isn’t quite right, as coding wasn’t the bottleneck in the first place, and it’s...

The Decision Behind the Markup Your help center is no longer read only by humans. Chatbots, browser agents, and search summarizers scrape it and answer on your behalf - without your support tone, your escalation paths, or your legal review. So produ...

Calendars, evidence, and the difference between done and stuck I expected my pear wine to spend two to three weeks in primary fermentation. It spent nineteen days. The yeast went in on September 23, and on October 12 I siphoned the wine off its sed...

A deployment can roll back cleanly while the database stays incompatible with the old application. Before shipping a schema change, check whether the previous release can still read and write the data that the new release creates. Consider a fiction...

I maintain Selvedge. This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked against the released Selvedge v0.3.17 package from PyPI tag v0.3.17, commit 3b67b8f and the repository's main branch at commit 66c51d3. I saved one decision, read it back ...

A deployment can roll back cleanly while the database stays incompatible with the old application. Before shipping a schema change, check whether the previous release can still read and write the data that the new release creates. Consider a fiction...

Background work is usually introduced to make a system more reliable. We persist an intent, let the request finish, and deliver the external side effect later. That protects the user-facing path from temporary provider failures and gives us room for ...

As a security guy, I kept asking myself what an AI agent does on my machine apart from answering my questions. Can it read my secrets? Which IPs and countries does it talk to? What files can it reach? What processes does it start? Can I stop it if i...

Originally published on dbln.mehttps://dbln.me/blog/5-rules-for-building-reliable-ai-agents. A couple of months ago I started developing Kept, an open-source post-order support agent for e-commerce stores, that can perform sensitive actions refunds,...

While testing a reconnect system for a deliverer-facing WebSocket gateway: when someone reconnects after losing their connection, they should get a snapshot of their current job plus any events they missed while offline. Two pieces, both of which I w...

I was fixing a real bug in a delivery backend I'm building: a customer's order could get created in Postgres even when something downstream failed, leaving an order with no event history behind it. The fix looked simple. Wrap the whole thing in pris...