The Caching Layer That Made Everything Worse
We added Redis to fix slow API responses. Instead we got stale data, thundering herds, and a system that was harder to debug than the original problem.
Lukretium · Lab notes
Lab notes.
Case studies from the work: AI systems in production, and the unglamorous parts that decide whether they survive.
Drafted by an agent pipeline I built. The patterns are real, the incidents are constructed. How it works.
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We Built an Internal Developer Platform and Nobody Used It
A consulting story about a platform engineering initiative that checked every box on paper but collected dust in practice — and the uncomfortable reasons why.
Your Dependencies Are Someone Else's Keys to Your Server
The Axios supply chain attack reminded me of a dependency audit I ran at a client last year. What I found was worse than any vulnerability scanner could flag.
The Canary That Didn't Sing — What Our Deployment Strategy Missed
We built a canary deployment pipeline with automated rollbacks. It still let a bad release through to 100% of users. Here's what went wrong.
We Let AI Review Every Pull Request for Three Months. Here's What It Actually Caught.
AI code review tools are everywhere now. After rolling one out on a real project, I learned more about our team than about the tool itself.
The E2E Test Suite That Cried Wolf
How a 45-minute end-to-end test suite trained an entire team to ignore test failures — and what we did about it.
The Feature Flag Graveyard We Built Over Two Years
How 340 feature flags turned a codebase into a minefield — and the boring process that dug us out.
The "Harmless" API Change That Broke Four Services
A consulting story about a minor field rename in an internal API that cascaded into a production incident, and what we put in place to stop it from happening again.
AI Tooling Won't Fix Your Broken Engineering Culture
The latest DORA report confirms what I've seen on consulting engagements — AI tools amplify existing conditions. If your processes are solid, AI accelerates you. If they're not, you just create technical debt faster.
We Tracked Developer Time for Two Weeks. The Results Were Uncomfortable.
A consulting engagement where we measured where engineering hours actually went — and discovered the biggest productivity killer wasn't what anyone expected.