Blog
Building and assessing AI-era software.
Notes from the work — architecture invariants, truth pipelines, testing, and operations. Written with receipts. RSS →
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Aug 5, 2026Camino 10/10
What shipping it taught me
The last note in the series — what held up (skills, invariants, truth as a build gate), what I'd do differently (instrument sooner, kill features faster), and the honest headline.
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Jul 31, 2026Camino 9/10
Twelve days with Apple's reviewers
The App Store review gauntlet round by round — a real defect, three AI questions answered by design, a caption edit — and why the standards, not the tooling, were the reason it survived.
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Jul 28, 2026Camino 8/10
The bug my wife found
A ducked-audio bug that survived multiple builds, the turn-taking fix, and the harder decision — retiring Lola's voice because the observed experience never fit.
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Jul 22, 2026Camino 7/10
Tests encode beliefs, and beliefs can be wrong at scale
The robots test the app — real magic-link sign-in, a 181-profile matrix in CI — and the night an audit found tests loyally protecting the wrong answers.
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Jul 20, 2026Camino 6/10
The funnel filed the complaints
First contact with real users — 1,200 views, two complete journeys, zero errors — and the funnel data that rebuilt the interview around one rule.
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Jul 15, 2026Camino 5/10
The code was correct. The platform didn't care.
Four production ops lessons from an AI build — in-memory counters on serverless, wide-open CORS defaults, a staging DB baked into prod, and dead source links.
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Jul 12, 2026Camino 4/10
The truth pipeline
How a three-step pipeline — source at scale, ground in primary sources, gate the build — turns hallucination from a prompt problem into a systems problem.
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Jul 11, 2026Camino 3/10
The walking skeleton
Why an ugly end-to-end walking skeleton beats polished fragments, and matters more with AI, not less — featuring the kitten Claude labeled "Madrid."
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Jul 8, 2026Camino 2/10
The most productive day was the day nothing got built
The four invariants behind Get Camino, set before any code was written, and how each one kept absorbing new surfaces as the product grew.
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Jul 5, 2026Camino 1/10
What makes an AI-built app "real"
The checklist I refused to ship without — real users, full pipelines, tests in CI, monitoring, rate limiting, security headers, and a citation on every claim.
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