Rewrites Don’t Fail at Release. They Fail in What Happens After.
Every rewrite inherits invisible debt — edge cases the old system silently handled for years, unknown to anyone, until they break.
Every rewrite inherits invisible debt — edge cases the old system silently handled for years, unknown to anyone, until they break.
We capped a 2.6M-character LLM prompt with slice(0, 10000). Latency dropped, dashboards turned green, and the model started answering with the wrong context....
The Strangler Fig — We Didn’t Rewrite It. We Outgrew It.
What running at scale taught us about the limits we didn’t set.
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Token Budget