Bahman's Musings

TL;DR: To safely tune your logging bill, you must first understand your log emissions. Evaluate them through the Log Quad: (intents severity frequency code-marker).No one writes log statements because they are aesthetically pleasing. In fact, they are impure, imperative side-effects that look like mould all over the codebase. We write logs because we know we need high-cardinality glimpses into our systems when the time comes. When a distributed system inevitably goes sideways, they are the only…

I recently wrote about my enlightenment: A mental model for working with AI Agents. TL;DR: see it as a collaborator who has read a thousand books on programming but has never written a single line of code. A collaborator who possesses immense knowledge but lacks any sort of wisdom and insight that comes from experience.That has become the guiding light in all my "augmented coding" sessions, be it in a professional setting or for my hobby projects, and it has let me have way more frui…

Everyone keeps writing or sharing about how powerful AI Agents are and how they can fundamentally change the way we do this or that.But I kept wondering: What exactly does it take to unlock that potential?Why do I struggle to effectively use them for anything beyond basic tasks?Why do I very frequently find myself frustrated by their inconsistent output and the need for endless tweaks in my prompts?Rarely anyone talks about the answers to these questions.💡See my follow-up post Brain-Work, Brai…