https://www.socraticblock.com/ Engineering writing from Jeff Vandervelde — Software Engineer. en Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/a-journal-that-refuses-to-guess/ https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/a-journal-that-refuses-to-guess/ The system being built to replace reading back through months of commits by hand is mostly a set of refusals: what it may read, what it may claim, and who is allowed to approve it. Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/from-repetitive-tasks-to-better-systems/ https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/from-repetitive-tasks-to-better-systems/ Most of a workflow's complexity was added one reasonable decision at a time, so the first question is not how to automate it but which parts should exist at all. Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/making-a-site-findable-is-a-decision/ https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/making-a-site-findable-is-a-decision/ The site was live and invisible to search engines by design. Opening it to crawlers meant one host, bounded metadata, and a recorded authorisation. Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/token-cost-of-a-long-thread/ https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/token-cost-of-a-long-thread/ Measuring where an AI coding fleet's tokens actually went produced a number that depended far less on how much context each call carried than on how many calls the work demanded. Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/when-a-remotion-render-passes/ https://www.socraticblock.com/notes/when-a-remotion-render-passes/ A 526-second film rendered cleanly while its pictures drifted away from the words. Every check it had could confirm the film was produced; none compared picture against narration. Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT