software-engineering

Files about software design, architecture, code quality, and engineering practice.

• Practicality vs. Precision — Principled LLM Code — legacy strata, worse-is-better as economics, the LLM refactor-cost inversion, persistence as the fix
• The Context Cache Hierarchy — Claude Code memory layers as a CPU cache; eviction policy, drift, and a memory-hygiene check
• Transpilation as a Grounding Strategy — transpile-to-grounded-language as the technique for legacy/obscure code; COBOL modernization
• Repairing LLM Code — The Two Oracles — structured programming (Böhm–Jacopini 1966 / Dijkstra 1968) is the LLM-readability argument; goto-count is the Goodhart trap
• The Substrate Is the Governing Mechanism — Agents coordinating through a shared store is read as the thing that makes them ungovernable.
• Comments and the Distance to an Oracle — an eviction rule for comments with a test behind it: distance to the oracle, measured by a fixed-context reader
• The Contract Model vs. the Substrate Model — a per-delivery contract (delivery / constraints+guardrails / proof artifact / outside-verification / owner) is the vault’s architecture with the accumulation stripped out — contracts don’t compound, substrate does; plus the artifact-vs-reader split in verification independence, and tests written only to pass as oracle collapse