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Essays, playbooks, and short notes on software, digital marketing, and start-up operating. One new piece each week.

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The Saga Pattern: Distributed Transactions Without Two-Phase Commit

Splitting a system into independent services solves a lot of problems. It also creates one specifically nasty new one: how do you change state across multiple services as a single atomic operation, when each service has its own database and there's no shared t

Composer 2.5 Hands-On: What Eleven Real Tasks Actually Revealed

The benchmark numbers on Composer 2.5 are now well-covered ground. I've written about them at length in the original builder's guide, and I've written about the head-to-head comparisons in the vs Opus 4.7 piece. What I hadn't done — and what most of the covera

Composer 2.5 vs Claude Opus 4.7: Where Each One Actually Wins

The benchmark numbers say Composer 2.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 are essentially tied on coding. The cost numbers say one of them is fourteen times more expensive than the other. So the right way to read the comparison is not "which one is better" — it's "which one

Composer 2.5 vs GPT-5.5: The Terminal-Bench Gap and What It Means

There's only one published coding benchmark where GPT-5.5 meaningfully leads Composer 2.5, and it leads by 13 points. That's Terminal-Bench 2.0 — the benchmark for shell-driven autonomous task completion — at 82.7% for GPT-5.5 against Composer 2.5's 69.3%. On

Cost-Engineering Composer 2.5 at Production Scale: The Real 10x Playbook

The headline number on Composer 2.5 is "ten times cheaper than the frontier models." That's accurate as a list-price comparison. It is also, in my experience working with teams migrating coding workloads at production scale, what most of them actually capture:

CQRS + Event Sourcing: A Production Architecture Guide

The companion problem to integration sprawl — which the ESB + event-driven architecture piece addresses — is state management at scale. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and event sourcing are the two patterns most teams reach for when their trad

ESB + Event-Driven Architecture: Internal Services and Partner Integration

Past a certain scale, the dominant operational cost in any enterprise system isn't building new services. It's connecting the ones you already have. Every new internal service needs to talk to half of the existing ones. Every new external partner is a bespoke

Composer 2.5 in Cursor 3: Parallel Agent Workflows at a Tenth of the Cost

Composer 2.5 and Cursor 3 shipped within twenty-four hours of each other last week, and the combination is doing more for my daily output than either one would alone. Composer 2.5 collapses the per-task cost of coding agents to under a dollar; Cursor 3's Agent

Textual-Feedback RL: How Composer 2.5 Solved Credit Assignment in Coding Agents

The most consequential technical detail in Cursor's Composer 2.5 release is one sentence in the announcement: the model uses textual-feedback reinforcement learning — localised hints at the point of failure injected into the training trajectory, instead of onl

Running an AI-First Business: Closed Loops, Business Brains, and Token Maxing

There is a way to run a business where AI handles sixty to eighty percent of the workflows. Not as a chatbot you open when you're stuck, not as a Zapier replacement bolted onto your existing stack. As the actual operating layer the whole company runs on. I've