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2026

  1. Determinism Injection

    Large prompts drift when they do deterministic work themselves. Determinism Injection hands that work to tools instead so that the prompt stays the orchestrator, and binaries handle the lookups, state transitions, and writes.

    3 min read
  2. Introducing Retrofit

    Introducing Retrofit, a CLI that records database schema evolution as logical, identity-preserving operators instead of hand-written DDL migrations.

    6 min read
  3. Evolving the RDR Process

    Evidence-based iteration on the RDR specification-first workflow: indexing research and Claude Code sessions in Arcaneum to mine and formalize the patterns I was already applying by hand.

    3 min read
  4. Arcaneum RDR Postmortem

    17 RDR postmortems, 208 drift instances, one meta-lesson: specify interfaces not implementations, verify APIs against source code, and plan for the full scope including Day 2 ops.

    3 min read

2025

  1. Arcaneum via RDRs

    Building Arcaneum using specification-first LLM development with RDRs, writing dozens of specs before a single line of Python code.

    3 min read
  2. Recommendation Decisioning Records

    Introducing RDRs - specification documents that evolve during planning to prevent purpose drift and wasted implementation effort.

    4 min read

2024

  1. AWS API Gateway with AppRunner

    Fronting a private AppRunner instance with API Gateway, by way of the L1 constructs and VPC plumbing the CDK does not expose.

    5 min read

2023

  1. Speedup AWS CDK Updates

    Faster CloudFormation stack updates, via the Java CDK, by using ordered Maps.

    2 min read

2014

  1. Cascading 3.0 Query Planner

    Cascading 3.0 proves we can abstract away the underlying platform by providing additional platforms users can execute against, not just MapReduce. Apache Tez is the first such addition. Tez is the latest parallel computation fabric from the Apache group. It builds on Hadoop, keeping the Hadoop File System for instance, but uses a model that removes inefficiencies that are baked into the MapReduce model.

    7 min read