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Alex Fadeev

Follow my Substack blog where I write about software engineering, system architecture, infrastructure, and building things that scale 📝

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Isolation Levels Across Databases: Why the Labels Mislead

The transaction setting you trust might describe very different behavior depending on the engine underneath it.

Choosing Between Agent Tooling Layers in 2026

Why strong AI agent systems mix command-line execution, schema-based integrations, and a better interface layer on top

Natural Language as an Execution Vector

What the 2026 agent-framework RCE wave taught us about trust, tooling, and the real security boundary in AI systems

Keep Transactions Fast, Not Fragile

Why external API calls and database locks should never share the same critical section in 2026

Hardening OAuth Flows Against Configuration Errors in 2026

How to review `redirect_uri`, enforce PKCE and `state`, and detect suspicious callback and token behavior before an implementation gap becomes account takeover.

A Browser-Based VSCode Token Theft Chain

How a webview input-handling flaw turned a single click into GitHub token exposure in 2026

When AI Agents Share Too Much Power

Two database deletion incidents, nine months apart, show the same infrastructure flaw hiding behind different tools

Choosing Less Infrastructure: A Small Team’s Case Against Early Kubernetes

Why a powerful platform can slow product delivery when your team is still small, your scale is modest, and your real bottleneck is engineering time.

When AI Agents Start Acting, Prompt Injection Stops Being a Small Bug

Why tool-using systems turn one malicious instruction into a cross-system security incident in 2026

Rechecking SQL Isolation Behavior Across MySQL and MariaDB

Using an automated transaction runner to revisit old concurrency results and expose where modern engines now diverge

Understanding PostgreSQL Table Locks Before a Migration Bites You

Subtitle: A practical guide to PostgreSQL’s eight table-level lock modes, the DDL statements that trigger them, and what those locks really stop in production.

Making High-Ingest Search Work on Postgres Replicas

How a write-optimized index design improved ingest speed, exposed a replication flaw, and led to a safer approach for standby nodes in 2026.

When AI Coding Help Backfires on Veteran Maintainers

What a controlled study of experienced open-source developers suggests about real-world productivity, benchmark hype, and why “helpful” tools can still make people slower in 2026.

Production GitOps Without the Demo-Only Traps

A practical guide to scalable GitOps architecture, release flows, multi-cluster design, security, and adoption risks for platform teams

Practical Transaction Isolation in Relational Databases

How locks, snapshots, and InnoDB isolation rules shape concurrent reads and writes

Prompt Injection in 2026: What Last Year’s Attack Data Means for AI Apps

A developer-focused look at how prompt injection moved from edge case to production security risk

Practical Observability for Modern Software Teams in 2026

A developer-focused guide to telemetry, debugging workflows, and resilient distributed systems

Why Your Delivery Pipeline Feels Slow

Common CI/CD design mistakes that quietly erode speed, reliability, and release confidence in 2026

When Vector Search Breaks in Production

What actually goes wrong in ANN-backed retrieval systems, and which signals tell you trouble is already underway

Read-Only Transactions Can Still Break Serial Logic

Why PostgreSQL serialization errors are not just for writes