#engineeringpractice

Engineering practice: git, code, tests · Chapter 1 of 12 · Craft · new chapter every Sunday...

A client asked me to take over a product two people and an agent had built in four months. It worked. It was sixty thousand lines, no human had read most of them, and the first bug took a week to find because there was nobody to ask. This is what inheriting vibe coded software is like, and what I'd have done differently in those four months.

Our take-home test stopped working in the autumn. Every submission was clean, tested and about the same as the others, because every candidate had used the same tools and the test was measuring the tools. We rebuilt the process around what still tells candidates apart, what they do with an agent's output. This is the loop, the exercise and what it found.

By spring an agent was opening more than half of the pull requests on our main service. Our review process was built for people who understood their own diff, and it broke in specific ways. 'Read more carefully' didn't fix it. Changing what a PR has to contain before a person looks at it did.

Someone posted about a conference where the AI use by academics was, in their words, absurd. The...

Waymo is skipping New York and Chicago for Singapore in 2028. The reason isn't market size. It's that Singapore published the test you have to pass — and that's a lesson you can copy.

Define planning gates, approval roles, material changes, lifecycle records and evidence for final acceptance of engineering work.

How to estimate software projects honestly: why two weeks becomes six, the iceberg under the happy path, ranges over single numbers, and calibration.

Matthew Green's read on Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results points at something every small team should notice: the scarce skill has shifted from generating work to checking it.

Technical due diligence before a rewrite: a structured 2-hour audit method covering architecture, security, debt, and cost range. What to expect.

A research spike should ship as running code, not a design doc. alchemy-utils surfaced 8 engine blockers a doc would miss, and priced the fix at 3-5 weeks.

Keep an AI agent inside your codebase conventions: CLAUDE.md structure, system prompts, mid-session stop prompts, and where lint rules beat text…