Cemal writes about building software with agents, architecture, and scale.

Solution architect and software engineerBuilding end to end with agents, and something of my own

The Workbench

A workbench of half-built ideas, finished arguments, and notes to myself — kept in the open. Learn more

Finished arguments. Long, opinionated, meant to change your mind.

Every boundary in a system is a statement about which team you trust to not break you.

Essaytoday

Systems do not break at scale. They break in a predictable order, and knowing the order is most of the job.

Essaytoday

Codebases are about to be read more often by agents than by people. That changes what "clean code" means.

Essaytoday

Replicas fix read saturation and nothing else. Here is the exact point where adding another one stops paying for itself.

Essaytoday

Repeatable decisions. Problem, context, approach, tradeoffs.

Budget the context before adding tools
Every tool definition costs tokens on every turn. Most agent slowdowns are a context problem, not a model problem.
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Idempotency before retries
Adding retries to a non-idempotent endpoint converts a visible failure into an invisible one.
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Measure before caching
A cache added without a measurement is a correctness risk you took for an unknown gain.
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One writer per table
The cheapest way to keep a shared database from becoming a distributed monolith.
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Outbox before dual writes
If a write has to land in two places, put it in one place and let a reader fan it out.
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Read replicas before sharding
When read load is the bottleneck, the cheapest correct answer is almost never sharding.
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Books that changed how I think about systems, work, or myself.