Newest first, grouped by year. Search or filter by topic.
A refactoring.guru walk through Pacco's real lines - a flags-enum search that can never match, twin guards, a dead password check, mappers that return null, and an Id that is never assigned - each smell named and each paired with the technique that cures it.
An agent can have perfect context and a flawless harness and still optimise for the wrong thing - what Klarna's 2024 launch figures and 2025 reversal actually teach about encoding organisational intent, and three mechanisms that stop that intent drifting.
Chronicle's persistence surface is two interfaces - a state repository and an append-only log - and the defaults behind AddChronicle() are two Lists. What the contracts really demand, why the in-memory implementations are sharper than they look, and how to write a provider that holds up.
Progressive disclosure at repository scale - how a hundred-line map steers agents through a million lines of code, what OpenAI's Codex experiment actually reported, and the benchmark run where changing only the harness moved an agent from Top 30 to Top 5.
The self-styled uber AI order maker resolves to FirstOrDefault behind an in-source confession, and its reservation heuristic structurally out-bids every earlier booking - the estate's data-science audit, written up as the short honest piece its eleven lines deserve.
KC Star V5's third star is keyed by a polymorphic ReferenceId and a hierarchy-level string, fed by real-time triggers, and tracked by an update log with a PENDING to COMPLETED status - a queue that isn't actually a queue. Closing the V5 series.
Why the context file that says what an agent must and must not do stays current for months, while the one that describes how the code works is stale by Friday - and how to decide what loads always versus what gets fetched on demand.
The smallest template in the catalog - a hundred lines of Redis cache config - as a study in what even the simplest secure-PaaS wrapper must still carry, and the one pipeline typo that quietly broke environment isolation. Part 8 of the Terraform Module Catalog.
OrderMaker drives a whole order through a Chronicle saga and reports its progress in a single RabbitMQ header - stamped on every publish, forwarded by seven copied MessageBrokers, read back by Operations, and backed by a saga store that forgets everything on restart.
Permissions(), Claims() and Scopes() in Configure() feel like magic until you read the mapping code - every endpoint gets its own named authorization policy built from closures at startup, and roles ride a plain AuthorizeAttribute. Part 7 of FastEndpoints in Depth.
The permanent infrastructure that makes every agent session start smart - tool configuration, codebase onboarding and workflow automation, and the evidence that the harness moves results more than the model does.
KC Star's dev stack stands up PostgreSQL and SQL Server with the schema auto-loaded through V4, pgAdmin pre-wired to the servers, and one command to a working warehouse. Here is how the compose file, the init scripts, and the pgAdmin auto-registration fit together.
The workflow that turns one long degrading session into three small clean ones - what each phase produces, why the artefacts matter more than the phases, and how much ceremony a task actually deserves.
Deliveries maps domain events into integration events that carry facts while Vehicles publishes bare ids straight from its handlers - two event philosophies in one estate, and a vehicle-to-resource mirror that syncs deletes but never creates.
Context windows degrade before they fill - the evidence for context rot, one team's 40% working rule, and the three ways a window turns toxic long before it runs out of room.
Seven parts of migration machinery existed to deliver one table — a hierarchical crumb trail with three ltree columns, a jsonb payload, GiST and GIN indexes, and a Dapper read side that speaks PostgreSQL's native operators. This is why it was PostgreSQL all along.
Operations subscribes to eighty estate messages from one hand-maintained JSON file - a shadow copy of every contract in the system that nothing validates, with ghost entries nobody publishes and real rejections it never lists.
V9 cached yes/no permission answers and inherited a revocation-staleness hazard. V9 Simplified caches finished calculation results instead - keyed on the employee's permission list, so a permission change changes the key and the stale entry is simply never hit. A better choice about what to cache.
Write and select decide what enters the context window - compress and isolate decide what survives inside it, from intentional compaction to sub-agents and the file system as the agent's real memory.
Orders and Parcels keep the estate's only cross-service contract honest with Pactify - a pact written to a relative path six directories above the repository, verified against a seeded Huge Weapon, and checked for shape only. Consumer-driven contracts with no broker, read from source.
Sync-over-async, a new HttpClient per call, out parameters everywhere - the discovery library needed a rewrite, and dozens of deployed consumers meant it could not break anyone. How the second generation shipped side by side with the first in the same NuGet package, what it fixed, and the one thing it deliberately kept. Part 7 of Service Discovery Without a Service Mesh.
When KC Star V9 denies a measure, it returns NULL, not zero - and the difference matters enormously once those values flow into aggregates. Here is the semantics of denial, the PermissionContext that records it, and why a redacted zero would quietly corrupt every total downstream.
LangChain's four-pillar taxonomy gives context engineering its working vocabulary - this part walks the first two pillars in depth, authoring what the agent wakes up knowing and choosing what a task actually needs.
local-exec key minting, external data sources wrapping PowerShell, and a post-apply ARM PATCH - the imperative seams that held a declarative Azure estate together, and the idempotency, portability and security bills they ran up. Part 9 of the Terraform on Azure series.
Everything that looks like memory in an agent is tokens being written back into the window - the mental model beneath all of context engineering, and the week in June 2025 when the discipline got its name.
