LLM Output Variance: When a Single Targeted Retry Pays Off
45% of LLM outputs changed on identical input. Here is how to turn that variance into a one-shot retry that recovers quality without burning retry budgets.
Latest posts
AI-Assisted Engineering
Scraped Translations vs LLM Consensus, a Blind Benchmark
We benchmarked glossary translations scraped from official sites against two-model LLM consensus. The crawl lost 9 to 1. Method and numbers inside.
Backend
When Sorting Silently Rebinds Your Files to the Wrong Records
An in-place sort plus index-derived filenames produces output that builds, loads, and validates fine while pointing every record at the wrong file.
Security
Fetching LLM-Suggested URLs Safely: an SSRF Guard in Go
Model-returned URLs are untrusted input. A Go fetcher with dial-time IP checks, DNS rebinding defense, per-hop redirect validation, and page verification.
AI-Assisted Engineering
A Non-Answer Is Not a Disagreement in LLM Consensus Gates
When one model fails to reply, counting it as disagreement poisons your retry budget and turns outages into verdicts. How to separate the two states.
Backend
Reusing a Validator Flips What Failure Means in Your Pipeline
The same fail-closed check is a safe skip when generating data and a destructive delete when auditing it. Here is how to move it safely.
Databases
FOR UPDATE Locks a Parent Row, Not Child Rows in Postgres
Locking a parent row with SELECT FOR UPDATE does not protect its child rows under READ COMMITTED. Three traps it creates, and the fix for each one.
Infrastructure
A Committed Build Artifact That No Deploy Step Rebuilds
A generated file tracked in git and embedded in the binary can ship without being rebuilt. There is no error, just a class with no CSS rule behind it.
Frontend
Screenshot Colors Are Not sRGB, and Your UI Will Show It
A hex picked from a macOS screenshot is in the display profile, not sRGB. Paste it into code and the color shifts. Here is the round-trip proof.
AI-Assisted Engineering
A Lossless Diet for an AI Agent's Bloated Instruction File
An always-loaded agent instruction file grew to 33,000 tokens. Here is how we cut it to a 10KB routing hub without deleting a sentence, and how we proved nothing was lost.
Frontend
A Button That Edits an Input Also Blurs It, Breaking Focus Guards
Focus-based dirty guards silently fail when a button writes to the input. Here is why the blur fires first, and what to use instead in live-updating forms.
AI-Assisted Engineering
Whisper's Prompt Silently Truncates at 224 Tokens, From the Front
Whisper's prompt parameter has a hidden 224-token limit. Overflow is cut from the front without warning, which can turn keyword biasing into a bug.
Frontend
Why preventDefault Does Not Stop a Global Keydown Listener
Two features bound the same shortcut and both fired. preventDefault cancels default actions, not other listeners. Here is the fix that survives the switch.
AI-Assisted Engineering
Frequency Is Not Importance: A Ranking Axis That Failed Its Gate
We ranked a domain vocabulary by corpus frequency and the top 20 came back all generic words. How a planned data gate kept a bad axis from shipping.
Security
A Privacy Gate for Text Your Agent Publishes Without You
An agent that writes and ships posts on its own needs a gate that cannot be talked out of blocking. Two layers, one local and deterministic, one isolated.
Security
The Safety Gate That Passed Everything, Including a 404
A content filter reported clean for months. It was reading nothing. Four ways a check silently inverts into an approval, and how to make failure loud.
Infrastructure
A Feature That Never Ran, Because One Service Lacked a Key
A feature failed every request from the day it shipped. One of four deploy targets was missing a credential, and the local environment hid it.
Security
Never Send Your Denylist to the Model That Checks for Leaks
Pasting your secret-terms list into a leak-checking prompt exports the index of everything you protect. Split the job so the list never leaves the machine.
Backend
Destructive Reads Turn Parse Failures Into Permanent Hangs
A worker read job results with GETDEL, so any payload it could not parse was gone for good. Treating that as "not ready yet" meant waiting forever.
Backend
The Completion Event That Never Arrived: Two Silent Drops
A per-item done event closed the whole stream, and the client subscribed after starting the job. Both dropped the notification while the work itself succeeded.