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  • A skill that was too long to be read carefully

    A two-thousand-word document describing this application’s architecture, which produced worse output than no document. A long document produces confident output that follows some of it, which is worse…

  • Five workflow files becoming one

    Four years of adding a workflow per concern, consolidated into one file with jobs. The concurrency model and the permissions become expressible once everything is in one file,…

  • Splitting by task rather than by subject

    Four skill documents organised by subject, replaced by six organised by task, which is the whole finding. A document loaded because a task started is read; a document…

  • An agent with a scope and a list of what it may not touch

    An agent definition, which is mostly a list of prohibitions. The last instruction is the one that matters and it is the one a general-purpose assistant gets wrong…

  • The test that had been quarantined since 2023

    A quarantine list with a deadline, three extensions, and one test covering a payment path that had been skipped for three years.

  • Coverage on changed lines only

    A merge gate on the coverage of lines the pull request touched, which is a different and better question. A global coverage threshold is satisfiable by testing the…

  • A denormalised schema that is rebuilt rather than synchronised

    A reporting schema shaped for the questions, populated by a full rebuild, which removes every synchronisation bug. Denormalisation is safe here because the table is truncated and rebuilt…

  • Block bindings for a field that used to be a shortcode

    A shortcode from 2016 rendering a meta field, replaced by a binding on a core paragraph. The meta key must be registered with show_in_rest and a sanitisation callback…

  • A TypeScript server in a PHP shop, and who maintains it

    A second language in the repository, and the question that matters more than the language. A second language is a maintenance decision rather than a technical one, and…

  • A contract fixture that a consumer stopped publishing

    Four consumer-authored fixtures fetched nightly, and one that stopped updating in November. A fetch that falls back to a cached copy on failure is being helpful and is…