Moving config into the database — without trusting the database
We moved billing-currency config into an admin-editable table while keeping a copy in code — bound together so any drift between them fails loudly.
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"Instruction rot: why your AI agent quietly does the wrong thing"
We audited the instructions our agents rely on and found around forty places where they no longer matched the codebase. Nothing failed loudly — but the drift was changing behaviour. Here's what we found and what we changed.
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An engineer you manage from a group chat
We built a coding-agent loop from Claude Code, Linear, Telegram, and git worktrees — no framework. Tickets become reviewable PRs, with a human approving every step. Day one, it shipped two merged fixes.
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What actually breaks when you drop the old column
Dropping our mirrored status column was easy in the model code. The real work was scripts, migration-graph conflicts, deploy timing, and NULL semantics.
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The cache that never hit
A unique job ID slipped into our cache key, giving a paid-API cache a 0% hit rate for weeks — no error, just quietly paying twice. Here's how we found it and what belongs in a cache key.
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Is Meta sending your WhatsApp ad click IDs? Your database already knows
We thought our Click-to-WhatsApp ads weren't sending ctwa_clid. One query on our own leads table showed the exact day it switched on.
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When your AI agent's memory overrules the user
Our build agent kept a persistent memory. A customer asked to change a dull background colour; the agent recalled an older "no bright colours" preference and ignored them. Here's why that happens, and what we changed.
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How we isolate Claude Code skills per client (it wasn't --setting-sources)
We assumed --setting-sources project isolated Claude Code skills per client. It only scopes settings, not skill discovery. The real boundary came from per-workspace git roots and a fail-closed allowlist copy step.
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How to move a live status field onto a new model without a big-bang migration
We moved lifecycle state to a new model without rewriting every query. The trick was keeping the old status column as a mirror and migrating the writers first.
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