Chaotic Commits | Software, AI, and Uncomfortable Truths

I built a cyberpunk cat RPG where you play a TabbyWarrior or a SphinxRogue fighting through Neo-Pawsburg in 2087, and right next to the game, you can watch the real production AI architecture executing live underneath it. I built this for AWS Summit LA because I got tired of watching people's eyes glaze over at architecture diagrams. This episode walks through the five reliability patterns tha...

I read the AWS forward deployed engineering announcement on a Tuesday morning. Palantir has been doing this for over a decade. And guess what? OpenAI does it, also Anthropic does it. A billion dollars from AWS means this is now the default way enterprise AI gets adopted at scale. But here's the question nobody asks in the sales meeting: when a vendor's engineer ships code to your production system...

My teammate and I had been at the whiteboard for most of the morning. Three pages filled, two markers gone, cap on one of them missing since 9:30. We had built a loop structure that runs at least once before checking its condition. We were proud of it. We walked to our tech lead's desk and presented what we'd built. "You mean a do-while?" In unsupervised isolation, I had co-inven...

An interview candidate asked me what makes our product safe from someone vibe coding a competitor. The honest answer was: nothing stops them. This episode is the full version of that answer. Vibe coding gets you a version of the thing: code that works under the conditions you tested, for users you imagined. What it doesn't get you is understanding. In consumer software, that gap is survivable....

My seven-year-old was trash-talking a Pokémon trainer. The way a seven-year-old does. And I stopped him: "I know they're just pixels, but can't you be nice?" That simple moment led to a much bigger question: What are we practicing when we interact with AI systems, chatbots, NPCs, voice assistants, and virtual characters? In this episode of Chaotic Commits, we explore what Tamagot...

It's 8:30 PM, and I'm lying in my four-year-old's bed playing Spiderman when the text comes in. "yoo, we are logging all of tenant config in prod logs has secrets in plain text." Not test secrets. Not staging. All of the secrets. Production. In the logs. This episode is the story of that night: what raise e actually does in Python, why a valid exception handler became a production security inciden...

A manager once told me, "If you get the work done, they will want more." He meant it as advice (and was a little sarcastic too). He was wrong about what to do with it. He wasn't wrong about the dynamic. This episode is about what happens when capable engineers become the workaround. The script you run once to fix prod becomes the script you're running for 300 users two weeks late...

I want to tell you about the last time I actually enjoyed using Google. I don't remember exactly when it was. That's kind of the point. At I/O 2026, Google announced an AI-first search experience. Instead of links, you get a synthesized answer. Conversational. Efficient. And I think we just killed something important. This episode is about three connected things nobody is saying out loud:...

Every computer science textbook explains distributed systems with boxes and arrows. I'm going to explain it with a warehouse in the suburbs where you can buy a kayak, a television, and a 48-pack of paper towels in the same trip. The membership card is your API key. The one-way entrance is your traffic ingress. The free sample person is the throttle (one per customer, retry window twenty minute...

It's Monday morning. You open your PR queue. Branch: codex/something. Two hundred files changed. Forty thousand lines of AI-generated code. Description: nothing. Just the check boxes for bugfix and new feature are checked. The author is a non-technical co-founder. This episode introduces accountability debt - the gap between who captures the efficiency win from vibe coding and who gets paged at 2...

What nobody tells you before you become a manager: the skills that got you promoted are the exact skills that will trip you up in the new job. Writing the code is no longer the job. The team is the job. And learning that takes longer than it should. I learned it during a User service migration that should have gone cleanly. I had the blueprint. I ran the same migration myself, textbook perfect, si...

I built a serverless AI dungeon master on AWS. Within twenty minutes, a player had broken it completely. Within forty minutes, a dragon had killed everyone at the table. Including the people who hadn't done anything wrong. This is the story of building a real AI agent system using Amazon Bedrock Agents, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB, and then watching what real users actually do with i...

What does "senior software engineer" actually mean? Why isn't being the smartest person in the room enough to get there? In this episode, I break down the real ingredients of engineering seniority: technical depth, the judgment you can only build by being catastrophically wrong in production, and the career trap of staying comfortable in a pond that stopped teaching you things. Featu...

It was 10:30 PM. The kids were asleep, the meeting summaries were done, the inbox was triaged... and the laundry was still on the floor. In the first episode of Chaotic Commits, I, a software engineer with a PhD and 15 years in tech, ask the question that lies hidden in that moment: Who is AI actually efficient for? From Amazon's infamous gender-biased recruiting algorithm to building AI tools...