Builder Journal
15 posts
The Bugs That Only Appear on the Second Run
Putting a working pipeline on a schedule surfaced four bugs that were invisible on run one, including one that ate 12,563 business formation records.
Builder Journal
The File That Was 269 Characters Too Big
My writing app's assistant kept saying it couldn't see the world bible. It took four commits to find out the file was 269 characters over the budget.
Builder Journal
The Allow Button Doesn't OCR
Permission dialogs sat on my agent's console until I happened to notice. Building a watcher that could see them, and click them, meant OCR, geometry, and one very small allowlist.
Builder Journal
The Mac Mini Is the Cloud Now
This week I deleted a cloud job runner and moved my site builder's AI onto a Mac Mini in my house. The reasoning beat the wiring.
Builder Journal
The Audit That Couldn't Save Itself
The audit found a real problem on one of my sites. Then it failed to save its own report. The real story of the week was a migration, not a check.
Builder Journal
One JSON Line on Stdout
When the caller cannot read the room, the script has to put the room on stdout. One JSON line, one status field, everything else on stderr.
Builder Journal
The Year 0003 Problem
Sixteen rows in a federal dataset claimed they were filed in the year 3. The schema lied, and that gap is where the real engineering lives.
Builder Journal
The Watchdog That Couldn't Fix It
A bash watchdog and the failure it couldn't restart: when your AI agent's CLI logs itself out and the only fix is a human at a keyboard.
Builder Journal
I Built My Own Analytics. Three Invisible Bugs Said Otherwise.
Building my own pageview analytics taught me that passing every static check and actually working are two very different claims.
Builder Journal