Building in the Open
- The bug is old. The way you drive the model through it is the new part. A mystery bounce on an OTP login, chased end to end: probing the error, building a mock to recreate it, red-bar tests, a two-layer fix, adversarial critic passes, and the CI gate. The three-line fix is the least of it. The discipline around the model is what actually solved it.
- A skipped test protects nothing. An inverted one guards the absence. Deleting a feature is a one-line change. Deciding what to do with the dozen tests that now fail is the real question, and the obvious answer is the wrong one. A reverse-TDD pass that keeps the suite honest about what is now true, and why it matters more once a model is doing the deleting.
- Prompting is just telling it enough of the story. The blank always fills with the most likely word. Prompt engineering is the plain act of telling a long enough story that the word you wanted becomes the likely one. You have done it since you learned to talk.
- Without code journals, your AI will fail you. A test proves the code still works. Only the journal remembers why you built it that way, and the why is the part your AI, and next-week you, cannot reconstruct.