Architecture
Bad acceptance criteria ship as bugs
Ambiguity in acceptance criteria doesn't disappear when implementation starts. It becomes a decision made without full context. The lineage problem, staleness semantics, product positioning: caught before a sprint begins, they're conversations. Caught after, they're migrations.
The demo is the test
A feature that passes every test can still be broken in ways the test suite is structurally unable to see. Four kinds of blindness that only surfaced once real stakeholders started using an AI booking assistant in a room.
The shape of shared libraries
A shared library is defined by the shape it presents to its dependents. Two cases make that concrete: an icon component used through an undeclared path, and a one-line logging change that quietly broke a numeric assumption.
The scaffolding tax: getting a new service properly bootstrapped
Bootstrapping a new service from a template isn't just renaming things; it's wiring it into the deployment pipeline, getting dependency management right, and building the scaffolding that makes all future work faster.