Notes from the lab on building software that survives contact with production — leverage, judgment, and what changes (and what doesn't) now that writing code is nearly free. Written by the people who do the work.
Every system has a thousand places you could push. Almost none of them move it. Engineering judgment is mostly the art of finding the one that does.
Now that writing code is nearly free, the constraint moves. The interesting question is no longer whether an agent can write a function — it is whether a specification can be built, correctly and reproducibly, by a fleet of them under discipline.
A transcript tells you what was said. It is silent on the tremor in the voice, the half-second of hesitation, the word that was hedged. Most of the signal in speech is discarded the moment you reduce it to text.