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
We Ditched Terraform 1.10 for CloudFormation: Reducing IaC Complexity for Our Small AWS Team We’re a 4-person engineering team managing 32 AWS resources across dev, staging, and production environments for a B2B SaaS product. For 18 months, we relied on Terraform 1.10 to manage our infrastructure as code (IaC). But by Q3 2024, the overhead of maintaining Terraform outweighed its benefits for our
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
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
War Story: I Ditched My CS Degree for a Bootcamp and Became a Go 1.25 Engineer I never thought I’d be writing this. Two years ago, I was three semesters into a traditional Computer Science degree, drowning in abstract calculus and outdated Java curriculum, wondering if I’d ever write code that actually mattered. Today, I’m a backend engineer working full-time with Go 1.25, building low-latency m
Opinion: We Ditched All Third-Party Mobile SDKs – Cut App Startup Time by 30% for iOS 18 When iOS 18 launched, our team braced for the usual post-release performance tweaks. Instead, we hit a wall: our flagship app’s cold startup time had crept up to 2.8 seconds, well above Apple’s recommended 1.5-second threshold for optimal user retention. After months of debugging, we made a radical call: rem
In Q1 2026, our team audited 14 2FA libraries for Next.js 15 and found that migrating from Google Authenticator’s legacy TOTP implementation to Speakeasy 2 reduced average 2FA setup time per user from 42 seconds to 21 seconds — a 50% reduction verified across 12,000 production user onboarding flows. ⭐ vercel/next.js — 139,252 stars, 30,994 forks 📦 next — 155,273,313 downloads last month Data