Feranor

Seven parts, twenty-three chapters, from the eleven core principles to governing AI agents, out today.

Conventional wisdom says governance is for large teams. A solo developer running a mission-critical trading platform needs it more than an enterprise does.

AI agents are fast, and speed amplifies whatever system they operate in. Scopes, four human checkpoints, and a kill switch.

Contract-first design isn't waterfall — it's the precondition for two teams to move at full speed in parallel. Here's the real velocity trap.

Notes from building and monetizing an MCP server with x402: five production bugs no test caught, and why they were all the same bug wearing different clothes.

Shared ownership is a polite term for no ownership. Why accountability has to be structural, not cultural — and what that looks like in practice.

A field guide to the five patterns that are quietly destroying your codebase right now. None of which look like a decision.

NASA lost a spacecraft to an undocumented unit assumption between two teams. Your last cross-team incident probably had the same root cause.

Why distributed systems don't degrade gradually — they cross a mathematical threshold, and the rules never changed.

A P1 took three days to resolve — not because of the bug, but because nobody knew whose system it was.