Writing and postmortems

• ARIES agent benchmarks11 Nov 2026 · 4 min read

  Running an agent benchmark on a supercomputer, without root

  ARIES started every part of a run with Docker. A supercomputer gives users neither Docker nor root, so I added an Apptainer backend: 6,678 lines, a way to measure containers that have no cgroup, and one hang that looked like the agent's fault.

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• ARIES agent benchmarks19 Oct 2026 · 2 min read

  What 320 agent runs taught me about serving LLM agents

  MCP tool calls were 2.7% of an agent's time, 96% of its input tokens came from the prefix cache, and the GPU sat idle most of the time it was held.

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• Building IoT platform19 Oct 2026 · 2 min read

  Finding a metrics bill in 914 orphaned Kafka topics

  Managed Prometheus was the third-largest line item and nobody had measured why. Attribution first, then a reaper, then dropping what nobody read.

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Want to be on the other side of one? Go on call for a simulated incident, and get a postmortem of your own response.

1. Near miss1 Oct 2026

   “Message sent” for messages nobody would read

   For the site's first 3 h 32 min, the contact form said a message was sent while keeping it on a disk that Cloud Run throws away.

   3 h 32 minthe form could lose a message

   6 of 6 actions doneRead it

2. Near miss1 Oct 2026

   The health check that only worked from inside

   Cloud Run's front end answers some paths ending in “z” itself, so /healthz returned 404 to every outside check while the app was healthy.

   0visitors affected: caught before launch

   3 of 3 actions doneRead it

3. False alarm1 Oct 2026

   A failing check on a healthy site

   The smoke test reported /metrics as broken while Cloud Run's logs showed every /metrics request returning 200.

   43 / 43requests to /metrics answered 200 during the replay

   3 of 3 actions doneRead it