Lukretium · 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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A 20-person team was running 14 microservices with three full-time engineers just keeping the infrastructure alive. We consolidated six of them into a modular monolith and cut their deploy time by 70%.
A client's team was drowning in a 200K-line TypeScript monolith. When we finally measured what was actually running in production, we found that almost a third of it was dead code nobody had touched in over a year.
We ran load tests before a big product launch, got green across the board, and watched the system buckle under real traffic two days later. The tests weren't wrong — they just weren't testing reality.
A client's on-call rotation was burning people out — not because of real incidents, but because of noise. Here's how we cut alerts by 87% without missing anything that actually required a human.
A single slow database query triggered aggressive retries across four microservices. Within minutes, the entire order pipeline was down. Here's how we traced it and what we changed.
A client's team tripled their PR output with coding agents. Six weeks later, their cycle time had doubled and nobody could explain why.
A 47-minute build pipeline had become sacred infrastructure. When we finally opened it up, we found cargo-culted steps, redundant checks, and a team afraid of their own tooling.
We ran blameless postmortems after every incident. We wrote detailed action items with owners and deadlines. Six months later, 78% of those items were still open — and the same incidents kept happening.
A tool comparison from a consulting engagement — what Biome actually delivered, where it fell short, and the decision I'd make again (and the one I wouldn't).
A consulting story about a nightly billing job that quietly started double-charging customers after a Kubernetes migration — and the boring lock that finally fixed it.