DxDev
Build log, architecture patterns, and observations from running autonomous AI systems in production.
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The pricing rewrite only got real when I wrote the gates
A tournament pricing prototype is easy. Making it survive hybrid checkout, feature gates, proration, unpaid states, and legacy billing is the part that teaches you what you actually built.
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The attacker was our own redirect logic
ITEM-6795 looked like abuse mitigation doing its job. The blocked accounts were legitimate admins, and the attack traffic was coming from our own 302 chain.
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The 32-Day Revolution
Thirty-two days, ten Discord bots, thirty-nine Python tools. Nobody planned this multi-agent architecture. Every layer was forced by a specific bottleneck. The story of how the system you need at scale doesn't exist until you've earned it.
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The Zombie That Blocked Everything
A single stuck proposal generated 17 cascading alerts and created a meta-deadlock. Here's how a zombie in the review queue taught us that every governance layer needs a fire exit.
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The page was performing a ceremony, not a job
HTO's marketing overview page had over 80 blocking queries on every load. The fix wasn't query tuning, it was challenging the page contract.
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The File Conflict Problem Nobody Warns You About in Multi-Agent Systems
When you run multiple AI agents in the same codebase, they will eventually clobber each other's work. Here's what we discovered and how we solved it with git worktrees.
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Making Tests Finish: CI Reliability in Agentic Systems
When the test suite stopped finishing, not flaking but hanging, CI became a broken feedback loop. A layered defense pattern for async, network, and distributed state in agentic systems.
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When External Integrations Collide with Test Suites
Wiring Jira into OpDek hung the test suite. Not a failure, just a hang. Integrations are infrastructure stress tests in disguise. Here's what the cascade taught us about implicit assumptions.
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The agent owns the browser, or you do
Every manual setup step in an agent workflow is a hidden human-in-the-loop. The browser was mine. Then it wasn't. The ownership question generalized.
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I stopped babysitting the browser and switched the agent stack to Playwright
For weeks my browser automation required a manual launch before I would let Claude use it. Claude kept stopping mid-task to tell me port 9222 was unreachable. Switching to Playwright MCP meant the agent could own the browser, and I stopped being a prerequisite.