Patterns
Short, opinionated write-ups on building autonomous systems with AI. Most of these came from incidents — things that broke and the rule that came out of fixing them. The kind of guidance you wish you'd had before the bug.
Three mandatory prerequisites before shipping any autonomous agent — kill switch, deduplication, circuit breaker. From the runaway-loop incident that cost real dollars and required a manual webhook deletion to stop.
If a feature has more than two steps, design the full pipeline before writing any code. Three fixes deep on the same bug means stop patching, start designing. The principle that turns chaotic debug sessions into deliberate engineering.
The full safeguard checklist for any project hitting an external API — rate ceilings, cost accounting, circuit breaker, dry-run mode, payload bounds, secrets handling, observability. The list you wire up before the first real call.
Always free libraries first; drawn SVG as fallback. The order — Lucide, Heroicons, Iconify, then claude-drawn — and why paid AI logo generators don't earn their place. Inline SVG, no CDN dependencies.