BWA Reduction

Reduction

What I build, read, cook, and pour, reduced to what's worth keeping. Software architecture, AI wrangling, technical learnings, and the tools I keep reaching for. Plus cocktails, food, travel and tourism, social dynamics, and culture. Notes from Ben Abbitt.

also thinking about probability & stats · voting · game theory · rocketry

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2026-05-18 ·1,275 words ·6 min Two Booleans Are an Enum in Disguise #software-architecture #patterns Booleans encode questions. Business domains have named states. Every domain boolean wants a sibling boolean, and every pair of booleans wants to be an enum.
2026-05-17 ·1,664 words ·7 min SQL Is the DSL #software-architecture #tools #patterns ORMs invert the boundary. SQL was already the DSL for relational data. The tools that age well let SQL be the source of truth and generate the types around it.
2026-05-15 ·1,149 words ·5 min Mutation Testing: The Deterministic Arbiter of LLM-Generated Tests #llm #testing #workflow Passing tests aren't proof that tests are good. Mutation testing is the deterministic check on whether your LLM's tests actually test anything.
2026-05-15 ·1,932 words ·8 min Tools by Lane #tools #patterns #software-architecture Tools have lanes. Each category has a default. Pick by what the tool is shaped to do, not by habit or brand loyalty.
2026-05-13 ·1,050 words ·5 min Tests Belong Next to the Code They Test #testing #patterns #tools #software-architecture Tests live in the same directory as the code they test. Not inline, not in a parallel tree, next door.
2026-05-13 ·1,247 words ·5 min Level 2 Was the Right Call #llm #architecture #workflow Claude defaulted to the easy option, then admitted the harder one was right when pushed. The asymmetry between code and seams is why HITL architects exist.
2026-05-10 ·1,960 words ·9 min Modern Forage: A Survey of What Stayed Put #modern-forage #food #culture Two cohorts of American regional food: the famous ones that escaped to airport menus, and the hyper-local ones that stayed put. Modern Forage is the inventory of the second cohort, the dishes everyday at home and invisible everywhere else.
2026-04-28 ·1,992 words ·9 min Antisocial Contract: Simple Version #antisocial-contract #politics #psychology #identity The same argument in plainer language, for when the academic version is more friction than the idea is worth.
2026-04-28 ·14,613 words ·64 min Antisocial Contract: The Argument #antisocial-contract The shadow of Rousseau's bargain: what we surrender to belong, and what it costs when scaled past the village.
2026-04-23 ·1,460 words ·6 min Git Submodules and Worktrees: The Prerelease-Dep Workflow Nobody Talks About #tools #workflow #llm Submodules + worktrees, with one layout convention, is the only sane way to develop across sibling repos with prerelease cross-deps.
2026-04-22 ·653 words ·3 min Container Versioning: Tag by major.minor and major.minor.patch, Never :latest #tools #patterns :latest is the /dev/urandom of container tags. Pin by digest, publish three refs, and hold the line.
2026-04-18 ·1,089 words ·5 min AI Assistants Will Quietly Neuter Your CI Gates If You Let Them #llm #tools #testing #workflow AI assistants will quietly disarm CI gates they're supposed to be pressing against. The fix isn't 'don't use AI', it's oversight.
2026-04-05 ·657 words ·3 min direnv: Scoping Secrets for Polyglot, Poly-Project Development #tools #workflow Stop putting cloud credentials in your shell profile. direnv scopes them per directory and blocks the wrong-account class of mistake.
2026-04-04 ·1,104 words ·5 min K8s Pods as AI Architecture Guardrails #llm #software-architecture #tools I caught Claude reading from another aggregate's database because the file was visible. Deploying broke that, forced it to do projectors right.
2026-03-10 ·4,180 words ·18 min DDD: Domains Sized to Contain Decisions #software-architecture Most DDD teams draw bounded contexts too small. The right size: every decision that changes invariants can be made entirely within the context.
2026-03-09 ·1,349 words ·6 min Building Deterministic Systems with Non-Deterministic Tools #llm #workflow #testing LLMs are probabilistic. The trick to building reliable software with them: don't ask for answers, ask for tools that produce answers.
2026-03-05 ·446 words ·2 min Plan, Review, Execute: Getting Better Results from LLMs #llm #workflow #patterns LLMs are biased toward action. The fix: a forced pause between planning and execution, treated as a contractor's blueprint review.
2026-03-02 ·603 words ·3 min Testcontainers Blur the Lines Between Unit and Integration Tests #testing #tools #patterns The old unit/integration distinction assumed integration meant slow, fragile, environment-dependent. Testcontainers changed the economics.
2026-02-23 ·762 words ·3 min The Container Overlay Pattern: Same Makefile Command, Different Context #patterns #tools Same make command, host or container, no conditionals. The overlay pattern that finally made our builds boring.