category
AI & agents
Working with AI as a practitioner: what holds up in production and what is just a demo.
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Agents can pay now. That was the easy half. A payments engineer reads the x402 spec: idempotency is an optional extension whose own guidance says to charge again when the cache fails, the documented refund is the seller voluntarily sending money back, and reversal only becomes possible where settlement stops being instant. -
I read more code than I write now Agents inverted the ratio between writing and reviewing, and reviewing is a different job with a different failure mode: human bugs look like mistakes, generated bugs look like decisions, and vigilance decays across a day in ways skill does not fix. -
What I actually let coding agents do A working engineer's division of labour with AI coding agents: where they genuinely excel, where they quietly rot a codebase, and the practices that keep the difference visible.