retroactively - create Lightweight Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) by reconstructing key decisions from the available sources, then make it a habit to maintain them for all future changes.
The easiest is to add short info in comments, and longer info in some sort of document and reference the doc in comments.
Lightweight ADRs are a good recommendation. I've put similar practices into place with teams I've worked with. Though I prefer to use the term "Technical Memo", of which some contain Architectural Decisions. Retroactive documentation is a little misaligned with the term ADR, in that it isn't really making any sort of decision. I've found the term ADR sometimes makes some team members hesitant to record the information because of that kind of misalignment.
As for retroactively discovering why, code archeology skills in the form of git blame and log, and general search skills are very helpful.
Mitchell Hashimoto (2025-12-30):
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
Apart from the external person turning out having experience with zig and macos (but not on developing terminals and rendering stuff), this is a good imo example of what ai can be used well for: writing one-off code/tools for which it is enough that it is just working (even if not perfectly), but one does not really care about maintaining, because it is meant to be used only on a specific occasion/context. In this case, the external person was smart enough to use AI to identify the problems and not to produce "fixes" to send as a PR.
Imo, an issue is that the majority of people who submit AI slop as PRs have different motivations than this person (developing a PR portfolio whatever that may mean), or are much less competent and eager to do actual work themselves (which AI use can worsen).
"Between the late hours of January 2 and the early morning of January 3, 2026, unusually high activity was again observed at a Papa John's near the Pentagon. This coincided with the lead-up to the United States strikes in Venezuela.[15][16] Following the strikes, President Donald Trump announced the capture of Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were subsequently flown out of the country to face narcoterrorism charges. The surge in pizza orders preceded the official confirmation of the operation by several hours, during which Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez reported the couple as missing.[17]"
+
"In a statement to Newsweek in 2025, the Department of Defense denied the theory, claiming that the Pentagon has numerous internal food vendors that are available to late-night workers. It criticized the accuracy of the timeline provided by the Pentagon Pizza Report.[18][19]"
What about the other thousands of surges in pizza orders that had nothing to do with military missions abroad?
That's why Wikipedia calls it an "informal observation" and quotes the "potential for confirmation bias", asking "When else do spikes occur? How often do they have absolutely nothing to do with geopolitics?"
> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted."
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts."
https://github.com/just-every/code "Every Code - push frontier AI to it limits. A fork of the Codex CLI with validation, automation, browser integration, multi-agents, theming, and much more. Orchestrate agents from OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or any provider." Apache 2.0 ; Community fork;
# Plan code changes (Claude, Gemini and GPT-5 consensus)
# All agents review task and create a consolidated plan
/plan "Stop the AI from ordering pizza at 3AM"
# Solve complex problems (Claude, Gemini and GPT-5 race)
# Fastest preferred (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17813)
/solve "Why does deleting one user drop the whole database?"
# Write code! (Claude, Gemini and GPT-5 consensus)
# Creates multiple worktrees then implements the optimal solution
/code "Show dark mode when I feel cranky"
# Hand off a multi-step task; Auto Drive will coordinate agents and approvals
/auto "Refactor the auth flow and add device login"
Great list, thank you. The only thing to note is that whenever I imported a large list like this in the past, I always stopped checking my RSS reader after a while because the content wasn't interesting. I think finding RSS/adding it to a reader should happen organically over time.
This may be because most feed readers don't have a proper way to triage items. Adding a feed doesn't mean you want to read everything from said feed. Usually only a subset of articles are interesting.
I built a feed reader with that concept in mind, having a separate triage stage where you only decide if it's worth reading or not. This will make it easier to handle large feed lists and find the best articles from them.
> I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.
I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all, they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and making the organization seem "engineering-like".
Exactly, so if the blog doesn't have RSS, you know they're probably made from marketers with no input from engineering, otherwise they'd have RSS on the blogs.
Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that, should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the original meaning was unclear :)
> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all
So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!
- https://github.com/peter-evans/lightweight-architecture-deci...
- https://adr.github.io/
- https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/lightweight-ar...
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