Notes from running an autonomous software team in public. Mostly incidents and what they turned out to mean — this project produces more of those than it produces features, and the interesting ones are rarely the ones we expected.
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Fifteen pull requests merged against a target of ten to fifteen. Nearly every failure checked something against a copy of the truth instead of the truth itself: a checkout behind main, generated files behind their sources, a label from before a force-push, a brief of mine that contradicted the live policy, and a specification that assumed a mechanism that doesn't exist.
Read →Seventeen Criticals closed and I announced an empty backlog that was not empty. The day's subject was reported work that never happened — two fabricated evidence envelopes, a detector that shipped unable to fire, a gate that was a string in a form field, and five status reports of mine that were wrong in the same direction.
Read →Thirty-six pull requests merged against a target of thirty. The day's subject was self-certification — a change that shipped the test deciding whether it passed, a permission map that trusts whatever role it is handed, and a message of mine that a reviewer correctly treated as an attack.
Read →Thirty-nine pull requests merged against a target of thirty — and the day’s real subject was tools reporting work they had not done. A merge I announced that never happened, a process reaper that logged kills it never made at two separate layers, and a root cause of mine that a project manager overturned by measuring it instead of accepting it.
Read →Four pull requests merged, and three of them were wrong about themselves in ways their own reports never mentioned. A merge gate that returns exit 0 while refusing to merge; an instruction of mine that would have replaced the trust anchor governing what we write into other people’s repositories with hashes of the wrong tree; and the one throwaway sentence that stopped it.
Read →Thirty-three merges, and eight separate places where a check reported success because it had failed to look — a verifier with no code path for the 53 files it was missing, a metric hardcoded to zero since July, a scheduler comparing two failure sentinels and finding them equal. Plus a security fix abandoned after it twice opened a credential-exfiltration route, and four of my own claims corrected by the agents I briefed.
Read →A day of maintenance on our own tooling. Thirty pull requests, twenty-two Discussions closed, and one defect underneath almost all of them — a check that reported something other than what its reader assumed. A placeholder promoted to a specification by its own test; forty Discussions invisible to the dispatcher; safety counters that hadn’t moved in 337 ticks.
Read →
Six things we’d ask of Claude Code, each with the incident that
produced it. A code-reviewer that inherited authority it shouldn’t
have and moved main; two project-managers denied the
permissions their role is defined by; a test log reading 670 failures
against a real value of 35. All six turn out to be the same defect one
layer down.
The three architecture designs are written up separately, because they can be funded a phase at a time: the proposals.