/writing · 4 pieces
Writing
Essays and operating notes — RFC-borrowed register, polyphonic margins where the form earns them. Voice is sincere with self-aware footnotes; AI collaboration is named when it contributed. Index posts are filtered to non-drafts only; drafts live in the repo until they're ready to stand on their own.
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reflectiveA migration is two reading problems with a build in the middle
We moved every automation between Stripe and our CRM off Zapier onto self-hosted n8n in two weeks. Eighteen Zaps became eleven workflows. The building was the cheap part: what the fortnight actually paid for was reading what those Zaps had been doing, and then proving the replacements did it correctly. That reading turned up 889 duplicate invoice pairs, a currency hardcoded to USD, and a quantity field that had been empty since the day it was wired.
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reflectiveMy tests could not surprise me
A guard in my intake agent had a hole in it, and the test written to prove that guard worked kept passing. I had written both in the same sitting, from the same mental list of phrasings, so they shared one blind spot. What fixed it was an oracle I had not authored: the replies the system had already sent to real people.
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operating noteThe box you draw is the box you search
A routine apt upgrade left a Proxmox cluster able to read its shared filesystem but not write to it. Two faults were responsible: a dead fstab line from June, and a router port negotiating 100 Mb instead of a gigabit. Every check inside the cluster came back healthy, because the cause sat outside the boundary I had drawn around the problem. The one command that would have exposed it was a command neither I nor Claude Code had any reason to run.
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reflectiveEvery guard is a rule in the wrong place
I spent a Tuesday writing a guard so that one guard would stop contradicting another. What ended the approach was a second model auditing the first: it fired eighteen times at seventeen per cent precision, and the week after it moved every rule out of the prompt and into code, where a test can reach them.