What I did
- Finished remaining tasks on the previous contract. Will occasionally be available through April for handover and questions
- First day on the new project. Started building the local dev environment
- Goal: anyone can spin it up as fast as possible
- Configured environment variables so debug info only shows in local
- Checked the state of the auth infrastructure and inventoried all work environments
- Sent emails to hiring candidates
- Organized remaining pre-pitch tasks (screenshots only, so continued deploys are fine)
- Confirmed the policy: start with free-tier services, upgrade when necessary
- Decided to keep all ticket management on GitHub
- Designing a workflow: Slack message → auto-create GitHub Issue → refine details via voice
- Evaluated whether to use Git LFS for large files. SCP to ECS might not work with direct connections → needs investigation
- Decided to pursue monorepo consolidation sooner rather than later
Learnings
Minimax Theorem
A fundamental theorem in game theory. When both players minimize their worst-case outcomes, the maximin value and minimax value always coincide. In other words, choose the option where the worst-case damage is smallest. Applicable to business decisions and risk management.
Claude Code Source Leak
An AI coding tool's source map was accidentally included in the npm package, exposing the full internal implementation. It became a huge topic on Hacker News with 1200+ points.
Interesting findings:
- Anti-distillation: Fake tool definitions are injected into system prompts to poison training data if someone records API traffic to train a competing model. Technically easy to bypass though -- legal protection is the real defense
- Native Client Attestation: A hash is embedded into HTTP requests at the Zig layer (below JS runtime) to prove the request comes from a legitimate client. A DRM-like countermeasure against third-party tools abusing internal APIs
- Frustration Detection: User frustration is detected via regex. Ironic for an LLM company, but rational when you compare inference cost vs regex cost
- 250K wasted API calls/day: Auto-compaction sessions with 50+ consecutive failures across 1,279 sessions were burning 250K API calls daily. Fixed with a 3-line code change
Lesson: Always verify source map settings in production builds. Don't trust build tool defaults.
Dev Environment Setup Philosophy
The first priority on a new project is building an environment anyone can spin up instantly:
- Template environment variables
- Clearly separate local-only configuration
- Start with free tiers, make paid decisions only when necessary
Bezos's 70% Rule
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.
Waiting for perfect information delays decisions. Move at 70% confidence. This applies to prototype pricing, tech stack choices, and more. Also realized that starting a business requires unexpected knowledge domains like labor law.