1046 posts · Page 44 of 88. ← Blog
Lesson 7 of Harness Engineering in Go — a sensitive action pauses for a human decision, and the whole suspension is nothing more than a Lesson 2 checkpoint marked awaiting_approval.
Series finale, Lesson 7: a sensitive action pauses for human approval, where suspension is just a Lesson 2 checkpoint marked awaiting_approval, the deadline is checked first so a late yes is void, and the action must be idempotent.
Arrays and strings in C are where the pointer model from the last post becomes concrete — and where C's most infamous security bugs live. An array is a contiguous block of memory whose name decays to a pointer; a string is just an array of characters with a null terminator and no length field. Understanding both, and the buffer overflows they invite, is essential C literacy.
Arrays and strings are where the pointer model becomes concrete — and where C's most infamous security bugs live. An array is a contiguous block whose name decays to a pointer; a string is just a char array with a null terminator and no length field. Understanding both, and the buffer overflows they invite, is essential C literacy.
Founders fixate on valuation and barely read the rest of the term sheet — which is exactly backwards, because the other terms decide who controls the company and who gets paid what when it's sold. A high valuation wrapped in aggressive control and payout terms can leave founders worse off than a lower valuation with clean terms. The term sheet is where the real deal lives, and the two categories that matter most — economics and control — are worth understanding before you ever see one.
Founders fixate on valuation and barely read the rest of the term sheet — which is backwards, because the other terms decide who controls the company and who gets paid what when it's sold. A high valuation wrapped in aggressive control and payout terms can leave founders worse off than a lower valuation with clean terms.
How lenders turn application and bureau data into a single, defensible number — and why the interpretable scorecard still wins in regulated lending.
The end-to-end credit-scoring pipeline: target definition (bad = 90+ dpd), feature engineering, WOE transformation, a logistic-regression scorecard, points scaling (PDO), and validation (KS, Gini, AUC).
Prompt injection can hijack what a model says, but not what it's allowed to do — as long as policy lives in a middleware pipeline the model never sees.
A system prompt saying never delete records is a suggestion the model can be talked out of. A gateway that returns FORBID for the delete tool cannot. Put enforcement where the model can't reach it and prompt injection stops mattering for access control.
Lesson 6 of Harness Engineering in Go — a supervisor splits a task, fans out to concurrent workers behind a semaphore, and fans the results back in decomposition order, with each worker's failure (or panic) isolated to one result.
Lesson 6: bounded fan-out behind a semaphore, ordered fan-in via a pre-sized results slice, and per-worker fault isolation so one sub-agent panicking becomes one failed result instead of crashing the whole run.
Pointers are the heart of C, the feature that makes it powerful and the one that makes it dangerous. A pointer is just a variable that holds a memory address — but that simple idea is how C functions modify their callers, how arrays and strings work, how dynamic memory is managed, and how data structures are built. Everything hard and everything essential in C runs through pointers.
Pointers are the heart of C — the feature that makes it powerful and the one that makes it dangerous. A pointer is just a variable holding a memory address, but that simple idea is how C functions modify their callers, how arrays and strings work, how dynamic memory is managed, and how data structures are built. Everything essential runs through pointers.
The chicken-and-egg problem of early fundraising is valuation: pricing a company with no revenue and no track record is nearly impossible, and haggling over an arbitrary number wastes time both sides would rather spend building. SAFEs and convertible notes are the elegant workaround — instruments that let a company raise money now and postpone the valuation question until later, when there's more to go on. They're how most early-stage rounds actually happen, and understanding their two key knobs (the cap and the discount) is essential for any founder or early employee.
The chicken-and-egg problem of early fundraising is valuation: pricing a company with no revenue is nearly impossible. SAFEs and convertible notes are the elegant workaround — instruments that let a company raise now and postpone the valuation question until later. Understanding their two key knobs, the cap and the discount, is essential.
Large language models earn their place in regulated finance as fast, well-supervised assistants — not as autonomous agents with a hand on the money.
Where LLMs fit in regulated finance: document analysis/extraction, retrieval-grounded Q&A, and agentic decision support — plus the guardrails (grounding, human-in-the-loop, output validation, audit trails) that keep them…
Passing an SDK client through a checkpointed agent workflow crashed on circular references. The fix reshaped how I cross @step boundaries.
Threading an SDK client through a checkpointed workflow crashed with maximum recursion depth exceeded. The checkpoint boundary is a serialization boundary: JSON only, values and keys, and anything non-serializable gets injected out-of-band at the composition root.
Lesson 5 of Harness Engineering in Go — a triage step that first-matches a keyword and hands the request to a specialist, and the exact place a substring table stops being able to think.
Lesson 5: a triage router first-matches a keyword to hand intent to a specialist, and the exact point a substring table stops being able to think.
C's control flow is the ancestor of the syntax you already know — `if`, `while`, `for`, `switch`. Its functions look familiar too, but they hide a defining C fact: arguments are passed by value, always copied. Understanding pass-by-value, and the call stack that makes function calls work, is the bridge to the hardest and most important topic in C — pointers.
C's control flow is the ancestor of the syntax you already know, and its functions look familiar too — but they hide a defining C fact: arguments are passed by value, always copied. Understanding pass-by-value, and the call stack that makes function calls work, is the bridge to the hardest and most important topic in C: pointers.