Systems
Architecture before ornament
Making a system look impressive is easy. The hard part is deciding what has to keep working when it's under load.
Engineering, written down.
Short notes on systems that have to ship, and stay up.
AI
Intelligence that earns its place
A model on its own isn't a product. Evals, fallbacks and a clear owner decide whether AI belongs in the system.
Delivery
The system after it ships
Shipping is only the first test. What matters is whether the system still works after launch week.
Data
Pipelines that have to settle
A dashboard is the easy part. The hard part is a pipeline that stays accurate when the source systems change.
Systems
Boundaries you can operate
A good engineer should be able to run your system without asking the person who built it. That starts with knowing what owns each piece of state.
From the labs.
Each one is an open-source repo we installed with no API keys, measured, and wrote up with the numbers.
MinilabKeylessOctober 13, 2026
strands-decider as a merge gate: 12 tests green, and the keyless path uses a fake model
We wrapped strands-decider as an allow, deny or escalate merge gate. Keyless run: 12 tests passed, deny exit 1 at 0.91, escalate exit 3 at 0.42 under a 0.8 threshold.
- 12
- tests passed
- 0.91
- deny confidence
SkilledDragonCorp/minilab-decider-merge-gate
MinilabKeylessOctober 13, 2026
Strands Box merge lock: git push to main denied in 26 policy cases, no live Box run
We wrote a default-deny Dogwood policy for Strands Box. Keyless: 3 of 3 cargo tests over 26 commands; git status allowed, git push origin main denied with exit 1.
- 3
- cargo tests passed
- 26
- policy cases
SkilledDragonCorp/minilab-box-contain-merge
MinilabKeylessOctober 13, 2026
Open Code Review as a merge gate: 8 of 8 tests green, LLM review untested
We pinned Open Code Review v1.13.0 behind a fail-closed PR gate. Keyless: 8 of 8 tests and 8 of 8 lab CI jobs passed. Without a provider key the findings come from our own scanners.
- 8
- tests passed
- 4.5 s
- test time
SkilledDragonCorp/minilab-ocr-scion-review
MinilabKeylessOctober 13, 2026
planning-with-files: a plan that survives /clear and an opt-in stop gate, 6 of 6 tests
We pinned planning-with-files and tested recovery from disk and its completion gate. Keyless: 6 of 6 pytest tests passed, and upstream pytest and vitest ran green in CI.
- 6
- tests passed
- 5
- phases tracked
SkilledDragonCorp/minilab-planning-with-files-gate