Every Insane Codebase Was Once Rational
Architecture certainty isn't on the menu. Decide for the horizon you can see, three to six months, and know which doors only open one way.
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Posts tagged engineering
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Posts tagged engineering
The Career I Built on Work Nobody Wanted
A career built on the audits, migrations, and offshore coordination nobody volunteered for, because that work maps a company fastest.
Your Coding Agent Has No Reason to Write Good Code
Coding models are trained on a pass/fail test signal. Maintainability isn't graded, so it isn't learned, and no harness you build can fix that.
Instrumenting LLM Calls in Phoenix with Telemetry
ReqLLM already emits token cost and latency telemetry events. The real gap is a few lines wiring them into LiveDashboard and PromEx, not another SaaS bill.
10 Ecto Query Patterns for N+1 and Beyond
The Iron Law for has_many vs belongs_to, plus when Dataloader, subqueries, or raw SQL are the honest fix, not another preload tutorial.
What Together AI's $800M Round Says About Elixir
Together AI raised $800M at an $8.3B valuation. A since-removed job posting showed Elixir/Phoenix on the BEAM running its auth and access control.
12 Phoenix LiveView Patterns for Production
Twelve Phoenix LiveView patterns that hold up in production: streams vs assigns, async mounts, PubSub gating, and the failure mode behind each one.
TDD With Claude Code in Elixir: What Holds Up
Where TDD with Claude Code actually holds up in an Elixir/Phoenix codebase (ExUnit async, mix precommit, Ecto.Multi idempotency) and where it breaks.
Secrets Management for AI Agents on Small Teams
Your agent's tools need your production keys; the agent itself never should. The broker pattern, per-tool scoping, and what a five-person team can skip.
What an AI Agent Postmortem Should Contain
Classic SRE postmortems can't explain agent incidents. The sections to add (decision-time context, autonomy rung, permissions delta), with a template.
The Claude Code Plugin Stack I Actually Run
The Claude Code plugins that earn a permanent slot in my stack, sorted by what they actually change: my process, my domain expertise, or just friction.
Programming Sucks, Now With Agents
An homage to Peter Welch's Programming Sucks, updated for agents: a genius intern with amnesia, hallucinated packages, and a closet that eats your auth layer.