Writing
Real incidents from my own production systems: the problem, the options I weighed with their trade-offs, what I chose and why. No invented scenarios, no generic AI advice, no listicles. First-hand only.
August 6, 2026 · 9 min read
How much does it cost to build an MVP or an app? The framework is the cheapest part. A builder's honest breakdown of what really drives the number: scope, the unglamorous 40%, integrations, and the freelancer vs agency vs solo-with-agents tradeoff.
MVP · solo founder · AI agents · cost · product
August 5, 2026 · 9 min read
25 skills, 5 agents and 4 MCP servers loaded into every session regardless of the project. The fix wasn't more docs - it was three layers, and knowing what actually enters the context window and when.
Claude Code · AI agents · context engineering · workflow
August 3, 2026 · 10 min read
An agent with shell access can delete the wrong thing, force-push, or leak a secret, and report success either way. Four layers - safety-checked mode, hard deny rules, a pre-execution hook, and behavior - that let it finish without touching the irreversible.
Claude Code · AI agents · security · developer tooling
August 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Running an autonomous agent on your own product and using an approved agent inside a large enterprise codebase are different sports. What transfers, what changes, and why the enterprise constraints are a feature.
Claude Code · Kiro CLI · AI agents · enterprise
July 30, 2026 · 9 min read
One mega-session drifts. The alternative: split a feature into three to five low-conflict subtasks with contracts up front, run each in its own git worktree with push disabled and no database access, then integrate once with end-to-end checks.
Claude Code · AI agents · git · workflow
July 27, 2026 · 8 min read
The counter-intuitive rule after months of daily agent work: on well-specified work the model is a latency lever, not a quality lever. When to spend the slow, expensive setting, when not, and why cranking effort never fixes a vague plan.
Claude Code · AI agents · workflow · productivity
July 24, 2026 · 10 min read
Not a one-week experiment: how I actually structure work with Claude Code and Kiro CLI on a production side project. Where agents genuinely accelerate, where they don't, the guardrails that make autonomy safe, and what it costs per month.
AI agents · Claude Code · workflow · solo founder
July 20, 2026 · 8 min read
npm audit flags a vulnerability in a package you never installed and cannot upgrade directly. The options: wait, force-upgrade, override, fork, or accept the risk. How overrides actually work, their sharp edges, and keeping CI honest about lockfiles.
npm · security · dependencies · CI/CD
July 8, 2026 · 8 min read
One user logged in, thirteen duplicate rows appeared. A check-then-insert in a Server Component render path raced against concurrent renders, and a swallowed error made it snowball. Where writes actually belong, and the one guarantee that holds.
React Server Components · Next.js · PostgreSQL · correctness
June 30, 2026 · 11 min read
Why I moved a live Next.js project off Vercel, the options I weighed (stay and pay, OpenNext, static export), what each would cost me, and the DNS, redirect and analytics surprises that only showed up after the switch.
Next.js · Cloudflare · Vercel · migration
June 21, 2026 · 10 min read
Pulling shared UI into its own package sounds like a weekend refactor. Then Tailwind majors clashed, a deleted brand color kept resurrecting itself, and CI couldn't install the package at all. What distributing a private shared package actually involves.
design systems · npm · CI/CD · Tailwind · monorepo
June 16, 2026 · 10 min read
Two real SSR-mismatch bugs: toLocaleString rendering different number formats on server and client, and an iOS-only flicker from a clobbered html attribute. The options weighed for each fix, and a general method for diagnosing the whole bug class.
React · SSR · hydration · debugging
June 12, 2026 · 9 min read
I migrated my SEO pages to static generation expecting near-zero compute. Active CPU went up instead. The culprit: default <Link> prefetching multiplying every visitor into dozens of server renders, and why prefetch={false} alone made the UX worse.
Next.js · performance · Vercel · debugging
June 7, 2026 · 12 min read
My side project hit two free-tier limits in the same week: serverless CPU and database egress. How I found the one query behind most of it, migrated dynamic SEO pages to SSG with client-side infinite scroll, and untangled the three cache layers everyone confuses.
Next.js · SSG · caching · Supabase · cost optimization
June 1, 2026 · 9 min read
A static, CDN-cached page scored a 5.7 s LCP with a 1.2 s FCP. The largest contentful element turned out to be a deliberately deferred consent banner. Five candidate fixes, their trade-offs, and why the counter-intuitive one (render it earlier) won.
Core Web Vitals · LCP · performance · Next.js
May 20, 2026 · 9 min read
My retrieval returned 200 OK and zero rows, silently. Why raw embedding similarity scores are model-specific rather than meaningful on their own, what real score distributions look like, and how I calibrated a threshold with eval pairs instead of intuition.
pgvector · embeddings · RAG · PostgreSQL · AI