engineering
5 posts tagged engineering.
I Shipped a Scoring Bug That Made Improvement Impossible — Here's the Fix
burst_score was computed over a file's entire commit history, which made it a one-way ratchet in the live risk score. A single bursty period years ago could keep a file stuck at CRITICAL forever, even after every other risk factor improved. Fixed in the next patch release.
Running Hotspots on expo/expo Without Running Out of Memory
expo/expo crashed Hotspots with an OOM. Here's the full account: what broke, the systematic fixes across memory and CPU, and the new escape-hatch flags that make very large repos practical.
What Happens When You Run Hotspots on 102,000 Functions
I stress-tested Hotspots against VS Code (102k functions) and found an O(N³) bug, a sampling tail exclusion bug, and a philosophical question about approximation accuracy — all in one sitting.
AI Agents Can Pass Tests. They Still Can't Maintain Systems.
AI coding tools have made writing software dramatically easier. A new benchmark shows maintaining it is still the hard part — and the failure modes are predictable.
AI Made Code Cheap. The Bottleneck Is Now Understanding Systems.
AI removed code production as the engineering bottleneck. The new constraint is comprehension - and most developer tooling wasn't built for that problem.