Dev Log: System Honesty
Build systems that tell the truth.
A system is only as good as its signals. If your queries hide waste, your health checks lie, or your tools repeat work, your system is dishonest.
I spent the day working on four different technical threads. Each one follows a single theme: making the system honest.
- Database Performance Stop fetching data you do not use.
- Use an N+1 detector in your development environment. It turns hidden lazy-loads into a clear task list.
- Remove unused eager loads. If your view does not use a column, do not fetch it.
- Memoize constants per request. Do not recompute the same value multiple times in one cycle.
- Group dashboard queries. Replace twenty small count calls with one grouped query.
- Real Health Checks A check that only verifies if a config exists is not a health check. It is a config check.
- A real health check must prove reachability.
- Open a socket to the target host and port.
- Use a contract or interface to swap between TCP, HTTP, or TLS probes.
- Run each probe on its own connection. One slow service should not stall your entire monitoring tool.
- Safer AI Tools (MCP) When you give an AI agent access to your system, you must assume it will make mistakes.
- Use idempotency keys. If an agent retries a request, the server should return the same result instead of creating a duplicate.
- Scrub personal data on the way out. Treat the response path as a public boundary.
- Use typed error codes. Do not send raw strings. An agent needs structured codes like "not_found" to act correctly.
- Identity and Password Resets Order matters when you touch multiple systems.
- If a password reset hits multiple directories, pick one source of truth.
- Write to the authoritative directory first.
- Document the sequence. "It worked when I tried it" is not a guarantee of success during a failure.
The goal is not to build flashy features. The goal is to build a system that stays trustworthy when you are not looking at it.