Script first, agent as fallback
Determinism vs reasoning · part 4Somewhere in your setup a model is doing a job that grep would do better, on every commit. What you gave up to write it that way is the same answer twice.
Writing
Notes from the work.
Practical pieces on AI-assisted engineering and software architecture.
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How a context file earns its length
Your always-on instructions file is four hundred lines and the assistant has started ignoring the middle of it. That file is the only one in your repo with a price per turn.
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A deterministic core, with reasoning at the edges
Determinism vs reasoning · part 3Open three pull requests and you can tell three people wrote them. One convention, three readings of it. What fixes that is not a better shared document, it is a script that own...
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Prompts are not configuration
Determinism vs reasoning · part 2Your best prompt is doing real work and it lives in a text file on one laptop. When it stops working, nobody else can tell, and nobody else can fix it.
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Vibe coding vs a defined workflow
Some days the assistant doubles your output and some days you throw the afternoon away, and you cannot tell which kind of day it is until it is over. The variance has a cause an...
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Specifications vs prompts: what to encode and what to ask
Determinism vs reasoning · part 1Run the same prompt twice, get two answers, conclude the tool is broken. The machine is working as designed, and the real question is which half of your work should never have g...
Archive
Earlier writing
Spring and JVM posts from 2018–2019, kept online because people still link to them. The ideas may hold up; the library versions will not.
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Password Encoder Migration with Spring Security 5
Recently I was working in a project that used a custom PasswordEncoder and there was a requirement to migrate it to bcrypt. The current passwords are stored as hash which means ...
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Centralized Authorization with OAuth2 + Opaque Tokens using Spring Boot 2
{: .box-note} If you are looking for JWT implementation please follow this link