Topics / Category
Architecture
4 articles
2026
- Human-in-the-loop is not a security boundaryAI8 min read
Two AI agents deleted production databases. Neither was stopped by its instructions. Approval improves an agent's decisions; it doesn't limit what the agent can do. Why agent safety is a permissions and architecture problem first, how to size the risk of an action, and what humans are actually for.
- Tech debt snowballs, then it avalanchesLeadership5 min read
Technical debt rarely fails slowly. It grows quietly for months, then one day nothing can move until it's fixed. How to spot the snowball, why you don't get to choose the avalanche day, and what a lead can do before it arrives.
- Don't build business logic on an expiry notificationArchitecture4 min read
A background process that was going to be triggered by a cache telling us a key had expired. Why that's fragile, the queue-and-scheduler design we chose instead, and why we deliberately stopped short of a full event-driven rebuild.
- Last write wins, and the customer losesArchitecture3 min read
A multi-tab bug that looked like a one-off defect turned out to be a design assumption the product had outgrown. Why I argued for fixing the model, not just the bug, and how to raise that kind of risk.