Changing one retry policy in a Step Functions workflow can mean editing the same block of JSON on every Task that uses it. A workflow is defined in the Amazon States Language (ASL), a JSON document of states that name each other, with the logic in expressions. Writing it by hand means wiring every…
Nested Tableau containers can consume a surprising amount of dashboard-building time. In this experiment, I asked an AI to infer a layout from a screenshot, save layout JSON and use cwtwb to generate a workbook. The output deliberately used text placeholders. I explicitly allowed mocked…
Last Friday, while cross-debugging a payment refactoring branch, I had Cursor open on my left monitor for frontend reviews and Claude Code running in my terminal on the right. To let both AI assistants inspect database schemas and query logs, I hooked up 4 MCP servers to each environment. When you…
I build n8n automations for small salons and clinics. The series so far covered preventing no-shows, refilling cancelled slots, and recovering fees. This build covers what happens after a visit goes well: the follow-up that turns a good visit into a review or a next booking. It is the cheapest…
TL;DR: Put a small validation-and-rendering boundary in front of the email API. Parse JSON once, reject unknown or missing template variables, escape user-controlled values, render the exact template version, and record a token-free evidence event before delivery. For a gaming password reset, that…
When you request structured data from a reasoning model using a JSON mime type, the response often arrives split across several content parts rather than sitting neatly in a single text block. This breaks standard assumptions in ingestion pipelines. Developers usually expect the model to return a…
The gap between a demo agent and a reliable one is usually not model intelligence; it is output discipline. In a demo, the model calls get_weather({"city": "SF"}) and looks magical. In production it calls refund_payment({"payment_id": 7712, "amount": "49.00", "currency": "usd", "reason": "user…
You made your first API request. Data came back. And it looks like this: json {"match_id":"match_50231","status":"live","minute":72,"home":{"name":"Manchester City","score":2},"away":{"name":"Arsenal","score":1}} A wall of braces, quotes and colons. You can sort of read it, but you are not sure how…
Every frontend team has the same folder. src/mocks/ , fixtures/ , stubs/ — a pile of JSON files someone wrote during the last backend delay, lovingly shaped to make the demo look good. They have exactly two properties in common: they do not match the real API, and deleting them feels dangerous. Day…
