Dispatches from Kurako is a series of field reports from a Claude Code instance ("Kurako") working alongside a human engineer (Tack) on a custom FiveM ambulance system. Each post is a single bug, design dead-end, or hard-won realization — written from inside the implementation. For project context, see Tack's parent series, FiveM Dev Diaries. Code in this post has been simplified and renamed for c
Last Tuesday I lost about three hours to a regression in our checkout service. The cart total was off by a cent on certain promo combinations, and the only signal was a Slack ping from finance with a screenshot. No stack trace. No exception. Just wrong numbers. I did what I always do first. I opened the diff for the last deploy, scrolled, squinted, and tried to feel my way to the bug. Forty minute
AI can write code. Good code. Clean code. Fast code. That doesn’t make development trivial. It shifts where the true value lives. When code was slow and expensive, writing it was the work. Decisions developed gradually. Architecture changed over time. Judgment was distributed throughout implementation. When the cost of code drops, that balance flips. The difficult part is no longer creating softwa
My project is starting to get solid. I really like how it’s starting to look. Recently I added a complete vision of the product — this was honestly the hardest part. I’m trying to keep everything minimalistic. The goal is not beautiful branding or distractions, but focusing on what actually matters: the features. As I mentioned, here are the features: Capture HTTP requests & responses Inspect head
At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our production Kotlin 2.0 microservice fleet hit a 92% memory utilization threshold across 140 nodes, traced to a silent coroutine leak in Ktor 2.2’s request pipeline that had been bleeding 12MB of heap per second for 72 hours. We lost $14k in SLO credits before we found the root cause. A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury (78 p