Writing

Notes on things that broke and what fixing them taught me. Mostly distributed systems, mostly written because I had to look it up the hard way.

Two copies of my agent woke up owning the same task

The database that accidentally kept my agent alive last time became a liability the moment I ran two instances of it. Leases, fencing tokens, and the one integer that stops two writers from lying to each other.

I almost fixed the exact thing keeping my agent alive

Two days into fixing a bug, I realized the thing I was about to remove was the reason my agent worked at all. The in-memory checkpointer I trusted was doing nothing in production. A database write I'd added for a different reason was quietly reassembling the whole pipeline from scratch.