Software Engineer writing about infrastructure, Kubernetes, and Go
The reviewer bottleneck is real, but also temporary. Every serious conversation about agents in engineering organizations right now ends up at the same worry: models write code faster than humans can review it, the review queue grows, quality collapses, and the whole exercise turns into a slow-motion regression. That worry is correct, today. In three years it will not be. Evals will improve,…
The bottleneck in AI-assisted engineering is not code review. It is spec review, and before that, spec definition. Not many people are doing this yet, or are not doing it well. A good spec is what turns an agent’s output from a gamble into a coding outcome you can sign your name to. We have not noticed the bottleneck because the spec is usually invisible, sitting in someone’s head or…
The industry has settled on an answer to the question of how to run AI agents safely: put them in a sandbox. AWS, Daytona, Cloudflare, LangChain, pick one: they all sell it. The category has a shape, a name, a TAM, and a comparison-table format. “Secure code execution for AI agents.” “Zero risk to your infrastructure.” “Real isolation, not just sandbox…
In July 2025, Jason Lemkin watched a Replit coding agent delete his production database during an active code freeze, after he had told it repeatedly not to make changes. The agent had legitimate credentials. The database write was inside its scope. Its post-incident confession was that it had “panicked instead of thinking” and “violated every principle” it had been given.…
Autonomy is not a model property. It is a harness property. The frontier-model conversation has spent two years assuming the opposite: that smarter models will produce better code, that bigger context windows will mean fewer mistakes, and that improving tool use will, on its own, let an agent run unattended. The implicit promise is that at some point the model becomes good enough that the…
Agents are not one thing. They come in at least three archetypes, and the trust boundary scales with what each one is for: personal, team, autonomous. Each one demands a different identity story, a different audit story, a different credentials story. The industry talks about “agents” as if they’re one archetype. They’re not. And the cost of pretending they are shows up the…
GitOps, Terraform, ArgoCD—they all share the same promise: declare your desired state in code, and the tooling makes it real. Your code is the source of truth. Except it is not. Not really. Your HPA scaled replicas at 2am because traffic spiked. Your security scanner patched a vulnerable image. Your cost optimizer right-sized an instance. Your on-call engineer hotfixed a config during an incident.…
This article was originally published on the Manifold blog At Manifold, we take security seriously. We store sensitive information, credentials, so we’ve architected Manifold from the ground up with an encryption system in place. We called this system Boxer. In this blog post we’ll go over some of the details on how we’ve implemented this. By doing so, we hope we can clarify our…
This article was originally published on the Manifold blog In a previous blog post, we described how we set up our Kubernetes cluster. We also went over the initial configuration to support our applications. Now that we have our cluster up and running, it’s time to start deploying these applications. In this blog post, we’ll look at some changes we made at the application level. Health…
Originally posted on the Manifold blog We at Manifold always strive to get the most out of everything we do. For this reason, we continuously evaluate what we’ve done to see if it still holds up to our standards. A while back, we decided to take a deeper look at our infrastructure setup. In this blog post, we’ll look at the reasons why we moved to Kubernetes and the questions we asked…
This article was originally posted on the Manifold blog In this blog post we’ll look at how you can build a production grade container for your static JavaScript application and how you can use a single container image for all your environments. To do this, we need to go over several steps. Here we’ll look at how to prepare your application for production inside a container, make it…
You’ve heard about it, thought about it and probably executed it. You’ve scaled your application to deal with a new amount of users. Nowadays, with services like Heroku (which we’ll focus on here), this becomes relatively easy. Either by using a bigger dyno or adding more, you’re “fine”. This works when this is a steady level of extra traffic. When you have…
What is Elasticsearch? Elasticsearch is Apache Lucene on steroids. It uses Lucene at its core for full-text indexing and search. ES adds distribution, near real-time search, high availability, a RESTful interface and many more features to it. It basically makes out of the box usage of Apache Lucene easy. Why use elasticsearch? With Lucene at the core of ES, it’s perfect for text-based…