Maya Chen

More instructions feel like more control. They're often the opposite. Here's what actually happens when you pile rules into a system prompt.

You write prompts like instructions. The model reads them like a probability problem. That gap explains a lot of bad outputs.

Every optimization adds complexity. Complexity adds overhead. Here's the specific machinery by which your app gains weight every time you try to put it on a diet.

Adding features is easy to justify. Removing them requires confronting sunk costs, user assumptions, and organizational politics all at once.

A race condition that vanished under a debugger taught one team something most engineers learn too late: observation changes what you're measuring.

Your LLM can technically read a novel. Whether it actually processes that novel is a different question entirely.

Most developers treat temperature as a creativity dial. It's actually reshaping token probabilities in ways that compound across every word the model generates.

Microservices promised independence and scale. For many teams, they delivered complexity and fragility instead. Here's why — and how to tell if you're already stuck.

A medical AI startup learned the hard way that high confidence scores don't predict accuracy. They predict familiarity. That distinction costs lives.

Developers optimize the code they understand best, not the code that's actually slow. Profilers exist to fix this. Most teams don't use them.

Writing code is a creative act with a blank canvas. Debugging production is forensic work with half the evidence missing and a clock running.

A deep dive into how the LLVM project exposed a class of bugs that experienced engineers had written confidently for years, and what that teaches us about trusting our own mental models.

Caching is supposed to make your app faster. But a misconfigured cache doesn't just slow things down — it serves confidently wrong answers to the users who matter most.

A crash tells you something is wrong. A silent bug lets you keep shipping broken software for months before anyone notices.

The attention mechanism that makes LLMs powerful also makes them scale quadratically with context length. Here's what that means for your infrastructure bill.

Longer prompts should mean better answers. Often they produce worse ones. Here's the actual mechanism behind context window degradation.

The internet doesn't know your name. It knows your numbers. Here's how five layers of addressing get data from a server in Frankfurt to the right tab in your browser.

Removing a feature is technically simple and organizationally brutal. Basecamp has done it more deliberately than almost anyone. Here's what they learned.