OffTheRails
Field notes from a Ruby on Rails developer who writes down every correction twice so he doesn't make it three times.
The legal assistant that couldn't be just one agent
One assistant read a client's confidential file and answered Instagram DMs from the same memory. That single agent, holding private data, untrusted input, and a way out, was one poisoned message from a leak. So I rebuilt it on Mastra as a team of role-scoped agents where no one holds all three legs, and picked up a captcha trick, an upstream bug fix, and a 40-minute outage on the way.
How I load anonymized production data into dev with evil_seed
Every developer on the team gave up half their disk to a production database dump full of PII, and the download took hours. I refused, lived on seeds, and one day was asked to ship a comprehensive anonymized demo DB. A top-down evil_seed walk would not stop pruning. Bottom-up worked, and the dump dropped to a fraction of the original.
How two AIs made me wipe my Mac
I needed disk space to restore a production database. I asked Claude for the biggest folders, got a sudo rm -rf for 48 GB of iOS simulators, and checked it against Gemini first. Both said it was safe. It deleted my entire home folder, the Time Machine snapshot, and recovery mode along with it. Here is what actually got me back.
Sergio rides shotgun
My phone buzzed at 9:30 AM with a tax-return reminder. I sent back two words and a few minutes later the transaction came back filed. Same week, a voice memo from a toll booth turned into a labor settlement package citing Article 232. This is what happens when you put an open-source agent on Fly.io and talk to it through Telegram.
From 3 AM deploys to a notifications skill: shipping web push with Noticed and AI help
The last time I shipped push notifications, I did it from my bed at 3 AM. A few years later, on a different app, I had to do it again. This time, at scale: 25 legacy mailers, a feature flag, an AI workflow, and one nasty bug where push subscriptions leaked between users on the same laptop.
If your MacBook falls off a desk, install Omarchy
My M3 Pro's screen cracked, my backup was a 2018 Intel MacBook Air that macOS had given up on, so I installed DHH's Arch distro on it. One discussion comment later, I was sending pull requests to basecamp/omarchy. Most merged within hours, and two days later they shipped inside Omarchy 3.5, plus a three-line kernel patch for the T2 SMC.