Every deploy was losing a handful of HTTP requests, but nobody noticed until a payment callback disappeared. The fix wasn't in the deployment pipeline — it was in the application code that never learned how to shut down.
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Blog
Engineering case studies from the work I do: 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.
- A routine ANALYZE flipped a Postgres query plan from an index scan to a sequential scan, and our API went from 12ms to 8 seconds. Here's what we learned about a failure mode most teams never think about.
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- A client moved their reads to database replicas for performance. The latency numbers looked great — until customers started getting charged twice and inventory counts drifted from reality.
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- A client found one of their API keys in a public error log. Tracing where that key actually lived took longer than fixing the leak — and revealed a secrets management problem nobody wanted to own.
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- A client's payment provider was sending webhook notifications correctly. Their system acknowledged every one. And then quietly threw most of them away.
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