Eighty Queries and a Four-Second Page: The Access Database Is Back

How AI coding tools eliminated the only design review most software ever got — the slowness of writing it by hand.

Apr 26 • Badri Rajagopalan

A Test Program Designed to Lose Money Ran in Production for 45 Minutes. Knight Capital Didn’t Survive It.

Dead code behind a repurposed flag, waiting for the input nobody tested. Knight Capital had one. Most codebases in 2025 carry hundreds like it.

Apr 22 • Badri Rajagopalan

The Integration Layer Is You

Why the smartest interface you’ve ever used still can’t buy you a book.

Apr 12 • Badri Rajagopalan

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When Platforms Own One Side: How Dominance Inverts Incentives — and What AI Platforms Will Do Next

Two-sided markets always turn opaque at dominance. With AI platforms, opacity won't be a choice. Neither will your relevance.

Apr 6 • Badri Rajagopalan

March 2026

The Model That Forgot What a Car Wash Is

AI models pattern-match before they reason. Your code pipeline has the same design.

Mar 29 • Badri Rajagopalan

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The Metric That Ate the System

Why the systems we build to prevent failure become the systems that guarantee it — and why the fastest organizations have the fewest failures

Mar 22 • Badri Rajagopalan

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OpenClaw Broke the Oldest Rule in Security Engineering

The same flaw that let Code Red infect 359,000 servers in 2001 is now running on your phone — with access to your email, your calendar, and your files.

Mar 12 • Badri Rajagopalan

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Your Tests Work. They're Testing the Wrong Things.

CrowdStrike had the testing infrastructure. They didn't have the failure scenarios to feed it. Neither do you.

Mar 5 • Badri Rajagopalan

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February 2026

Every Authentication Method Is Another Way In

How the OR problem in authentication design turns every new login button into an attacker's shortest path

Feb 27 • Badri Rajagopalan

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A Self-Driving Car Killed a Woman. An AI Tool Broke an AWS Service. The Same Predictable Failure.

The psychology that predicted both has been published since 1983.

Feb 21 • Badri Rajagopalan

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The Fight Over AI Isn’t About Income. It’s About Access.

Universal Basic Income is a solution to the wrong problem

Feb 15 • Badri Rajagopalan

August 2025

Why Your Engineering Teams Are Like Three Chaotic Suns

How Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” Helped Me Recognize the Physics of Complex Technology Organizations

Aug 25, 2025 • Badri Rajagopalan