Topic
22 posts
Run a monthly drill with a deliberate violation. Verify which controls reject it, report failures, and confirm cleanup. The drill attempts real merges, including an administrator override; use a disposable test repository and inspect the…
Run the task queue on a schedule. Separate urgent failures, requests for your decision, and routine logs. Detect missed runs, and understand why a watch on the same machine cannot detect that machine's complete failure.
Add a separate reviewer, require automated checks before merging, and verify the deployed result before marking a task complete. Configure a runner, a GitHub workflow, and command restrictions, with explicit limits on what each can verify.
Give each task acceptance criteria, dependencies, and a status. Define how the agent selects the next eligible task and when it must stop. Includes a queue template and a five-item exercise.
Write down the actions agents may take, the actions requiring your approval, and the evidence they must provide before reporting completion. Includes a permission template and exercises that check whether an agent follows it.
Document which repository owns each part of the project. Assign each agent a specific scope and a separate checkout to prevent overlapping edits. Includes layout instructions and a repository-splitting exercise.
Turn a project rule into a script that detects violations. Run it before each push and test it with a deliberately invalid change. Learn what a local Git hook checks and how it can be bypassed.
Write a decision record documenting what you chose, which alternatives you rejected, and when to reconsider. Instruct agents to read relevant decisions before proposing changes, then test whether they retrieve them.
The third post in the SDD numbers series is not about velocity. Since June the platform's effort moved into four quiet systems: an externalized memory, a statistical screen that refuses to flatter me, a point-in-time data floor, and a pr…
The full path to an agent platform that edits its own instructions is already published, scattered across seven articles that never mention each other. I run that architecture as one person: supervisor and worker tiers, verification guar…
Record what a feature must do, what is outside its scope, and how you will verify it. Create a specs directory and template, then give the agent an approved spec to implement.
SpecSelf looks like a set of features: coherence checks, persona rotation, review cadences, an audit trail. Every one of them was implied by ten frontmatter fields decided on day one. A life-OS is not a feature list. It is a schema decis…
I built a method as a public repo and the product that runs it as two private ones, and none of them treated the others as a source of truth. The domain enum lived in four places. A persona drifted between its lens file and its API contr…
Three months ago I laid out spec-driven development and the folder architecture that makes it work. Most of the playbook held up in daily production use. Three ideas that essay never mentioned turned out to matter more than anything in i…
In one working session I designed a read-only advisor and spent the rest of it being the customer of another. Both ran on the same short discipline: surface the decision and never seize it, verify before you assert, pilot before you fan…
A team holds its hard-won knowledge across many heads. A solo operator holds it in one, and that one forgets. The fix is to externalize memory into structured records the tools read by default, so the system remembers what the person can…
The most dangerous result is the one you want to be true. Your own review is compromised by the same motivation that produced the finding, so the fix is a standing skeptic whose job is to refute, not confirm, before you act on anything.
The instinct with agentic tooling is to add: more agents, more skills, more clever prompts. The leverage runs the other way. Here is the test I use to decide whether a piece of work should be a script, a hook, a skill, or an agent, and w…
Boris Cherny mapped five execution archetypes on the Claude Code team, and noted they cut across job titles. His framework describes a team dividing labor across people. Run a fleet alone and the same five split a different way: across y…
Why good validation reports every problem at once instead of failing on the first one, and how to build the accumulator, phasing, and structured errors that make it work.
Why spec-driven development and structured folder architecture are the missing infrastructure for AI-assisted engineering: methodology, common mistakes, and where to start.
My review of Doug Kerwin's Enterprise Vibe Coding Playbook: its advice on prompting, design, and review, who I'd recommend it to, and the spec workflow I'd add.