Support asks a year after the payment: "Why did the customer receive €117? And which card did we charge?"
A supportable system answers that with one query. If answering means trawling archived logs, guessing what the exchange rate was that day, and hoping nobody edited the payment method since, you don't have a supportable system.
Record the decision at the point you make it, and never destroy the data it points to.
Throughout my career the one thing I've watched kill good products is a single word: resource.
Once a company calls its people resources, it starts treating them like resources. It adds them, rotates them, splits them across teams.
The product is the first thing to suffer.
Yes, you want a team. The dynamic of that team decides far more than the org chart admits.
Read More →Our software craftsmanship group encourages new speakers to come and practise their talks.
One is coming up in August. At the start of every meetup we read aloud the code of conduct.
It can feel formal, but the repetition is the point. It sets the culture and reminds us who we want to be.
A question can be good and still land badly. The timing and the room decide.
Read More →A confident voice can ask a sharp question at the wrong moment and close a room down. In a meetup, the cost is one nervous speaker and a room that goes quiet. In a company, the same habit compounds, meeting after meeting, until the same few people decide what the team is allowed to say out loud.
You see the pattern at conferences first. The people who are confident keep speaking. The people finding their voice hold back. Over time the room narrows. The same voices return, the same ideas circulate, and the different takes never get a hearing.
Read More →Most Claude Code sandbox guides sell convenience. Fewer prompts, smoother flow, less time approving commands.
But what about the blast radius?
When an AI agent runs a command, it does not only run the command you had in mind. It runs every child process, package script, setup hook and recovery step that command sets off.
A helpful agent reads a README, installs a dependency, retries a failed setup step, and turns "get this project running" into "execute whatever this project tells me to execute."
The sandbox is a boundary, not a trust button. And the boundary only protects you to the extent you configure it.
Read More →I’ve seen non-developers build apps that would have taken engineers days, if not weeks.
Not just functional apps, but polished apps with rich functionality that bring joy to users. They meet real needs, and the attention to detail is unmatched.
Product people and domain experts can build good apps, and they build them fast.
So the question is: when does a vibe-coded app become a real product?
That is the question a lot of companies are about to face.
In many businesses, engineers are no longer the only people building the next prototype. Client managers, sales teams, product people and domain experts build it too, using tools like Lovable, Base44, Claude and other AI app builders.
And that is a good thing.
Read More →@jagreehal/sandbox-node runs your npm install in a throwaway container that can see your project and the registry, and nothing else.
Install scripts still run. node-gyp still builds. Your SSH keys, npm token, cloud credentials, and .env are not in the box, so a malicious dependency has nothing to steal and nowhere to send it.
Get the sandbox command, run one setup step, and put sandbox in front of the commands you already run.
New to Node, or not sure why npm install is risky in the first place? Start with why install-time code is a trust decision, then what running it in a throwaway container buys you. Otherwise, read on.
The most-recommended npm defence right now is a cooldown: refuse to install any version published more recently than a few days ago. pnpm shipped it as minimumReleaseAge, Aikido Safe Chain turns it on by default, and after the recent Shai-Hulud-style npm worms, it became the advice everyone repeats.
It is good advice. It closes the window these worms detonate in. But "set a cooldown" is being sold as if it were the whole answer, and it is not. A cooldown knows one thing about a package: how old it is. There are at least three reasons it is not enough on its own, and for those, age is the wrong question to ask.
Read More →You run npm install without thinking. It looks like a download step. It is a trust decision.
Every package that resolves into your tree can run code the moment it installs, with the same access you have: your SSH keys, the npm token in ~/.npmrc, your cloud credentials, your .env. Not the package you typed. Any of the hundreds underneath it. You approved none of them by name, and the package manager never asked.
The fix is not to read more or trust less. It is to run that install somewhere your secrets are not.
Read More →