Give every state in your workflow a named consumer on a schedule. That is the first rule I hold for an agent-run software factory, and it is the first of four I tightened in September. The short answer is that agents are very good at creating work, and nothing
Alert on the presence of expected output, not on job failure. That one inversion is the cheapest monitoring upgrade I know, and I now build it into every scheduled thing I own — because a job that fails is already screaming at you, and a job that quietly stops being scheduled
Give every agent its own identity, mint it locally, scope it to write and never admin, and test the kill switch before you need it. That is the whole rail, and I install it before a new agent gets anywhere near a repository. The reason it looks like that — rather
Go find your CI kill switch before you need it, and confirm it is reversible. Mine is a single repository setting that disables Actions entirely, and I know it works because I have exercised it: last week my own estate started minting pull requests faster than anyone could read them,
Give every agent loop a turn budget before you give it a loop guard. The budget bounds the bug you have not found yet; the guard only bounds the bug you thought of. I build and operate agent fleets for a living, and that ordering is the most load-bearing
Audit every test tier you own against two questions asked separately: can it block a merge, and can it fail. Most teams verify neither, and a suite that misses on either one is decoration. I run this audit across my own agent stack on a schedule, and the run worth
I run a real Kubernetes cluster on a stack of arm64 single-board computers. Not a toy — it hosts my Git server, this blog, and the automation I lean on every day. It's cheap, quiet, and sips power, and I'd build it the same way again.
I've rebuilt the way my agents talk to language models three times in about three months. Each rewrite solved the previous one's biggest pain and then exposed the next one. The version I run today routes everything through a multi-provider gateway called OmniRoute — but that
Six months ago I got tired of introducing myself to my own AI assistant. Every session started the same way: re-explain the architecture, re-list the repos, re-state the decisions I'd already made and the mistakes I'd already learned from. The model was brilliant
Every major technological shift begins with a distraction. Early motorists were captivated by engines, not the quiet discipline of the assembly line. Early computer users marveled at silicon, not the operating systems that made it usable. And today, in the early days of AI, we are all fixated on the
Everyone sells the medallion architecture on the same promise: your Silver layer is cleaner than your Bronze. Deduplicated, conformed, typed, joined. That's true, and it's also not the payoff that matters. After building a governed memory store on Databricks — Delta for the raw tier, Postgres for
A few weeks ago I stopped trusting my own traffic graphs. The edge dashboard told me one story — steady visitors, healthy numbers, nothing alarming. So I built a second view that reads the origin's own access logs instead of the edge's summary, and the story fell