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
The task at hand is drawing the circuit schematics for a robot I'm working on. I had already written down the components and the connections, all that's left is to draw it in KiCad. I had already started doing that, but then... I got sidetracked forcing Gemini to create the circuit using KiCad. I would have made progress if I had continued doing it by hand. I spent yesterday trying to generate an
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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
This is part three of a series on display consistency in embedded systems. The first two parts were technical. This one is about why the technical parts worked. The picture: ATtiny85 thermometer. Neural network inference. QUAD7SHIFT display. Built from datasheets. He had datasheets. No Stack Overflow. No libraries to install. No AI to generate boilerplate. No tutorials that abstracted away the in
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
If you've ever used a bottleneck calculator, you've probably seen a simple percentage telling you whether your CPU or GPU is holding your system back. But here’s the truth most people don’t realize: Bottlenecks are not fixed numbers — they are dynamic, workload-dependent behaviors. In this post, we’ll go beyond basic tools and break down how CPU and GPU bottlenecks actually work in real-world scen