Topic16 articles
Architecture, systems design, developer workflows and the practice of building software that lasts.
Startups / Software Engineering
Cuegence never failed, because we never built it. Part 3: the budget line, the replacement question, and why great engineering problems aren't great businesses.
Startups 10 min read
Three pivots, six calls with the people who actually sign purchase orders, one question: is this a budget line? Part 2 of the Cuegence postmortem.
Startups 7 min read
Curriculum graphs, evidence provenance, memory decay — a genuinely beautiful engineering problem. Part 1: how that beauty replaced the question of who would pay.
AI 14 min read
A multi-model web development pipeline — research, design, implementation, review — eventually orchestrated by a boring Python while True loop.
AI 16 min read
AI coding tools feel transformative, but the productivity evidence is mixed. Part 2: perceived speed vs measured outcomes, and why review is the bottleneck.
AI 16 min read
AI-native engineering isn't about how much AI you use. It's a development model where AI is a primary participant in building software, not an assistant.
AI 18 min read
AI-native engineering isn't about removing humans. Part 5: how roles, teams, economics and accountability shift when implementation stops being the main work.
AI 19 min read
A useful AI workflow takes more than a better prompt. Part 3: specifications, context engineering, agent workflows, and the harness that enforces boundaries.
AI 18 min read
One agent can misunderstand a requirement; several misunderstand it differently. Part 4: coordination, multi-agent orchestration and verification at scale.
AI 16 min read
I spent 12 million input tokens on a small monorepo change. The problem was not the model. It was the development environment around it.
AI 11 min read
An opinionated workflow for building good-enough software with AI coding agents without surrendering architecture, judgment, or security.
Software Engineering 11 min read
Chasing 10x across six projects, several languages and a pile of AI agents — and the quiet realization that 1.5x is honest work.
Software Engineering 13 min read
Complex read-only queries have hidden inside POST /search for years. The HTTP QUERY method is safe, idempotent, and built for body-heavy reads.
Software Engineering 6 min read
Stop cloning the same repo for every context switch. Git worktrees give you several branches at once — no WIP commits, no broken dependencies, no clutter.
Software Engineering 11 min read
Laravel gets dismissed as outdated PHP, yet it still ships serious business applications faster than most modern stacks. Why it's still my backend default.
Software Engineering 6 min read
When Jira, ClickUp and OpenProject overwhelmed a non-technical creative team, I built a small app focused on backlog pull, visibility and simplicity.
