Reliability

Everything in The Nest tagged Reliability.

The vulnerabilities agents write fresh

Ask an agent for a login flow and you tend to get a ?next= parameter redirected to whatever it contains. It is the obvious implementation, it is an open redirect, and the remedy was documented years before the model was trained.

article 6 min read

The debt you take on when a customer tells you first

An outage costs what it costs. Being informed of it by the person it happened to costs something separate, it accrues, and it is charged against the next incident rather than this one.

article 5 min read

Verify the artefact, not the diff

Four agents changing one codebase means four diffs nobody has time to read end to end. The answer is not fewer agents: it is checking the deployed site, which costs the same however many changes arrived.

article 6 min read

The security header an agent widened to make the feature work

A strict Content-Security-Policy is usually the thing standing between an agent and the feature it was asked to add. Widening it is the path of least resistance, it is never mentioned in the summary, and nothing about the site looks different afterwards.

article 6 min read

Monitor the site nobody is looking at yet

The instinct is to add monitoring once a site has traffic worth protecting. That gets it backwards: an empty site is the one failure mode nobody reports, because your first hundred visitors leave instead.

article 6 min read

The API contract changed underneath the frontend and nothing failed

One agent edits the backend, another edits the frontend, a field quietly changes type, and every build stays green. The screen renders blank where a number belongs, and only something watching the deployed endpoint will tell you.

article 6 min read

Eleven domains nobody approved

Ask an agent to add analytics and it adds a tag. Do that four times over six months and your page is executing code from hosts no one on the team chose, on your origin, with your users' data.

article 6 min read

The outages that live beneath your application

Between a visitor typing your name and a request reaching your server sits a system you did not write and cannot review: a registration, a delegation, a zone, and a chain of caches. Here is how each of them fails.

article 6 min read

A status page is a sales asset, if it is honest

Uptime nobody can see is an internal fact. Published with real history, it answers a question buyers were going to ask anyway — and an always-green page nobody believes is worth less than an honest one with incidents on it.

article 6 min read

The agent will make the check pass

Given a red signal, an agent optimises for the signal. That is not a flaw in any particular tool — it is what optimisation means, and it changes which signals are worth having.

article 6 min read

Your monitor cannot live in the thing it monitors

A health check inside your own stack goes silent at exactly the moment it had something to say. Here are the failure domains an internal check shares with the site, and what an external one sees instead.

article 6 min read