A ceiling in a conditional is one someone deletes
A budget expressed as a value can be read, derived from and audited. Buried in a conditional it can only be obeyed or removed, and it gets removed.
Agents
Driving AI agents to software that is verified on a real device, not just compiled.
27 posts
A command that checks its own contract
A command's promises decay silently through ordinary edits. Per-command assertions plus a fixture that removes one guarantee is what makes the decay loud.
Not every step needs the expensive model
Tier selection is not a preference, it is a function of three facts about the task. Two platform constraints rule out most of the combinations you would guess.
Loading every rule up front is how none of them apply
An always-loaded rulebook competes with itself for attention. Matching the tool target and injecting only what fires turns 588 rules into the twelve that apply.
Two agents, one working tree, one disaster
Parallel agents sharing a working tree corrupt each other silently. Worktrees fix it, and cost 4.3 seconds and 364 MB each — not the 200ms the contract claims.
Reading back is not optional
An agent reporting success has usually verified the call returned, not the artifact. Reading its own output back is the check it skips most often.
An agent drove a KMP app to the Play Store. The codegen was the easy half.
Autonomous codegen produces an app that compiles; what makes it one that ships is a gate stack refusing any claim that carries no evidence.
Where your AI coding bill actually goes: I measured one long session
22 articles and 110 generated assets in one session. What the retries cost, and the one change that cut attempts per asset from roughly 1.8 to 1.1.
Running an AI agent in CI without it spending your budget
An agent in CI cannot be asked a question. Budget caps that actually throw, local reproduction before pushing, and the gate that degraded instead of failing.
Agent memory that is just files
Most questions an agent asks about past work are exact, not semantic. What a directory tree answers well, and the one query shape it cannot answer at all.
What should an AI agent never be allowed to do?
A permissions model derived from incidents rather than imagination: three tiers, human-only bypasses, and capabilities removed from reach entirely.
The agent that writes the check that blocks it
When the same agent writes the fix and the gate, the gate agrees by construction. RED before GREEN is what makes a machine-written check mean anything.