DxDev
Build log, architecture patterns, and observations from running autonomous AI systems in production.
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My backups had been dead for three weeks. I found out by accident.
I split a sprawling AI ops monorepo into five sibling repos. The rename exposed runtime automation that had been silently dead for weeks.
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Hotfix branches need different rules than develop
Running /sync from a hotfix branch tried to merge develop in. On a 25-year-old ASP-classic codebase with an active release in flight, that would have dragged unfinished work toward master. Tooling gap caught during ITEM-6690, April 2026.
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The bug was wearing a trench coat
On April 21, two hotfix branches merged into develop the same day. ITEM-6831, ITEM-6833, and ITEM-6834 looked like one customer complaint and turned into three different bugs: bad payment data, wrong scope resolution, and a deploy that would have re-broken the fix by Tuesday.
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A 25-second admin screen usually means you trusted the wrong query
A responsive-design bugfix on the Staff Center turned into a lesson about tooltip-grade features doing production-grade database work.
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The bug wasn't the upload, it was the URL contract
Inside a day of debugging a 25-year-old ASP-classic form, where a querystring namespace collision hid behind an upload bug and exposed the real shape of AI-paired work in legacy code.
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The create event dialog had to die
A tournament form got better the moment I stopped pretending it belonged in a dialog. What a design-review session revealed about legacy UI containers, and why the right fix was deleting the pattern.
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The real fix was starting over with a smaller blast radius
A day of AI-assisted UI iteration only became shippable after I stopped patching a broken prototype and rebuilt the change behind org-only methods.
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The bug was not in the mobile UI
A mobileOrder field that appeared to save and then silently dropped its value. The investigation found that ADD and UPDATE had been writing different data shapes for years inside the same HTO module save path.
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AI will happily ship the wrong mockup
A Saturday UI rebuild that looked fine and was still wrong. What the gap between plausible and correct costs you.
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The fastest legacy hotfix is often a debugger
A Saturday evening of customer tickets got faster the moment I stopped patching and started building the diagnostic tool first.