#debugging
Every post tagged "debugging".
34 posts · showing 11–20
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Why Your Codebase Will Grow Faster Than Your Understanding
Writing code built understanding as a byproduct, which is why "the team knows the system" used to be true without anyone planning it. That coupling broke and only one of the two rates changed.
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Onboarding Into a Codebase Nobody Fully Read
"Ask whoever wrote it" assumed someone did. Where code arrived complete in one commit and was approved rather than authored, the history holds no reasoning — and onboarding is where you find that out.
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Why Systems Thinking Is Appreciating in Value
"Systems thinking" is vague enough to dismiss until you name the mechanism: agents work locally, and cross-cutting consequences are structurally outside their context. That gap is a person's job.
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Context Engineering Is the Job Now
Not prompt writing — that's the visible part and the small one. The work is deciding what reaches the model, in what form, at what moment, and it's where most agent failures start.
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Debugging Code You Didn't Write and Don't Understand
The instinct is to hand the failure back to the agent. Without a reproduction that produces a plausible fix to a plausible cause — and two rounds later nobody understands the module at all.
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Half the Job Is a Real Answer: Designing for Partial Success
Thirty-one of forty invoices reconciled. Reporting success hides nine; reporting failure throws away thirty-one. The middle is where most runs land, and most designs can't express it.
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From Prompt Edit to Signal in Under a Minute
A six-minute iteration buys you ten experiments a day; a thirty-second one buys a hundred. Four fixes, about an afternoon of work, and the seam that everything else depends on.
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Should Agents Talk in Prose or in Schemas?
Prose carries the nuance your schema didn't anticipate — and dissolves it across three hops, turning "probably rounding" into an established fact. Structured with a bounded escape hatch, and a rule for when to promote.
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Designing the First Turn: What Happens Before Any Tool Call
Everything after it inherits the frame it sets. Four things belong in turn one — and when a run fails at turn twelve, this is usually where the defect was introduced.
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Tracing Standards for Agents: What Fits and What's Missing
A run is a trace and a turn is a span — the mapping is cleaner than expected. Two things break: payloads far too big for span attributes, and sampling that discards exactly the runs you need.