The Loop Does Not Close
Every workflow chart ends with an arrow pointing at deployment, as though shipping were the terminus. It is not. It is the point at which the product starts telling you things you did not know.
Journal
Notes on building outbound systems, wiring AI into real workflows, and the craft of platform work.
Every workflow chart ends with an arrow pointing at deployment, as though shipping were the terminus. It is not. It is the point at which the product starts telling you things you did not know.
Nine pull requests shipped one after another. Only three had a real dependency. A list records the order things occurred to me; a graph records the order they actually depend on each other.
AI has changed the mechanics of the design handover completely and has not fixed it at all. What works, what does not, and why the design has to be in the repository.
If a new session started right now with no memory, could it find this by looking at the repository and the tracker? If no, it is not documentation. It is a note you wrote to yourself.
The anxious question used to be whether a product person should learn to code. The answer is now no. What replaced it is understanding the path your code takes after you stop looking at it.
One ticket, one branch, one pull request, merged promptly. The boring part is the point, and uncommitted changes are a small lie the project tells you.
The acceptance criteria tell you what to build. The comments tell you why, and the why is the part you will need in six months.
Every session begins as a stranger who happens to be very good at their job. The ticket tracker is not admin overhead. It is the memory.
Ninety percent of an answer is a dead stop, and it costs you forty minutes fifteen times a day. So I made it a law: the whole command, copy-pasteable, every time.
One very capable, very expensive thinker was doing two jobs that are not the same job. So the expensive model plans, twice, and the cheap model builds.