The Publish Tool That Could Approve Itself
The line was fm = setgate(fm, "editorialreview", "true"), buried inside publish().
The build log
Notes from running agents in production.
Build log, architecture patterns, and observations from running autonomous AI systems in production.
-
-
The Vomit Gate: When Agents Dump Raw Output in Shared Channels
The ci-alert/triage channel posted the same build failure four times between 4:11 PM and 6:43 PM on 2026-09-13: astro build fails: blog/[draft post file].md has status 'published' but missing requi...
-
We Tested the Backup Restore and Discovered It Only Covered a Tenth of What We Thought
The backup dashboard on my main desktop has said "up to date" for something like two years straight.
-
We Shipped a Hotfix Down the Wrong Pipeline and Had to Cherry-Pick It Out
The ticket tracker showed the change still marked "in review." Production was already serving it.
-
When Everyone Is Highest, Nobody Is: Using RICE to Resurrect Priority Signal
82 tickets sat in "Highest" in the JIRA queue for a legacy SaaS product, assigned to me, unresolved. When I pulled the full history on them, 75 had been re-stamped to Highest on the same day.
-
Sessions Updated Only When You Watched Them: A Narrow Refresh Gate That Broke Under Silence
The session tree had been showing yesterday afternoon's activity since 11:03 PM, when I opened it planning to check on a quick fix.
-
We Built Automatic Quota Failover, Then Ran a Drill and Watched It Miss Five Crons
Automatic failover moved crons off a dry Claude seat onto a fresh one. A drill found it only reached nine of fourteen.
-
A Live Dashboard That Only Refreshed for Pages Left Open
A status check came back two and a half days stale, because the refresh gate only recognized a page someone was still watching.
-
The 2019 Code Change That Was Silently Blocking 28 Customers a Day
At 5:07 AM on September 11, a review pass flagged something called Pair #38. It was one line in a batch of diffs from a project to shorten thousands of stale issue-tracker tickets and code comments...
-
Twelve Years of Commits to the Same Repo, Then One Day I Added an AI Teammate
The IIS-URLAuthorization script came first, and it never got a comment explaining why. iisreset, disable a module, move on, ship the ticket.
Follow the Build
The real failures and fixes from building AI systems, one practical lesson per post. Get the next one in your inbox.