Engineering Notes✳
Notes on systems that work for people
Short, specific writing about system design, automation and AI — what the work actually involved, what changed, and what remains uncertain. Every note is reviewed before it appears here.
All notes
Making a Site Findable Is a Decision, Not a Setting
The site was live and invisible to search engines by design. Opening it to crawlers meant one host, bounded metadata, and a recorded authorisation.
The Cost of an Agent Is the Shape of Its Work
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.
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.
When a Remotion Render Passes but the Video Is Still Wrong
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.
The Best Automation Decision Is Often to Delete the Step
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.