Notes on building software that lasts.
Field notes on architecture, process, and the craft of shipping products that teams can carry forward.
Context Engineering: How I Turned a Coding Assistant Into a Teammate
How a few folders of Markdown turned a stateless coding assistant into a teammate that compounds — and why the system looks a lot like good management.
Read article →Adding a Paid Tier Without Betraying Local-First
Toldari keeps all your data on your device, with no account and no backend. Adding a paid cloud tier meant storing data off-device for the first time, which is a one-way door for a privacy-first product. Here is the model I used to walk through it without breaking the promise.
Read article →Infrastructure as Code May Say Everything Is Fine. Sometimes It's Wrong.
Claude's infrastructure template passed the dry run clean, then the real deploy failed five times over. A green preview proves the template is consistent, not that it will deploy, and knowing that gap is the review I had to bring.
Read article →The Bug That Showed Up Three Times Wearing a Different Disguise
Read, check, write looks completely safe. Under real traffic it can quietly corrupt your data. Claude got it wrong three separate times before I stepped in and taught him why.
Read article →Everything Was Green Locally. Then I Turned On CI.
Claude got the app building on my machine, then the first clean CI run fell over four different ways. Each had the same root cause I had to point out: the build was quietly leaning on something only my laptop had.
Read article →Stop Retyping That Command
The throwaway shell command you run for the third time is trying to tell you something. I started listening, and my dev loop got noticeably calmer.
Read article →Building Features Your Own Server Can't Read
Claude handled the cryptography fine, the easy part. The privacy promise nearly broke on three sharp edges around it that only a careful review caught.
Read article →React Native Said "Write Once." Android Sent Me a Bill.
Claude wrote one UI for both platforms, exactly as React Native promises. Android still collected its tax in small, maddening bugs that may never show on the device on your desk, which is why someone has to go looking.
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