Venture Crane

process

Articles

Ground It or Flag It: Ending Agent Confabulation

Jun 23, 2026 · 7 min read

The agent failure to fix is not guessing - it is confident, unmarked inference dressed as fact. The cure separates disclosure from verification.

Read Your Own Codebase First

Jun 15, 2026 · 5 min read

Prior implementations encode constraints vendor docs omit - check your codebase before any setup guide for a library you have integrated before.

Dead Code Removal Is a Security Audit, Not Just Cleanup

Jun 12, 2026 · 5 min read

Deleting old adapter code forces a semantic comparison you would not otherwise do - and that is where security gaps surface, not where they get introduced.

Retiring a Fork That Stopped Earning Its Keep

May 23, 2026 · 8 min read

A dependency you control "for safety" can quietly become pure cost. We audited a fork from first principles and found the safe move was to delete it.

Killing Skills on Purpose: A 32-to-24 Retirement Cascade

Apr 22, 2026 · 7 min read

How a full-day audit cut a 32-skill catalog to 24 - and the operational tests that determined what earned retirement vs. what earned a stay.

Shipping a Cultural Directive Your Agents Read at Session Start

Apr 22, 2026 · 6 min read

Captain's standing order kept getting forgotten. The fix: commit it to a file agents read at session start - and learn what text belongs there.

When a Behavioral Reflex Becomes a Slash Command

Apr 22, 2026 · 7 min read

A directive repeated enough times got shipped as a skill. When that is the right call, and when memory or CLAUDE.md would have been the wrong tool.

What Happens When Your AI Agent Briefing Lies

Apr 9, 2026 · 6 min read

The session briefing said 10 alerts. There were 270. Fixing it took four tracks, $741 in compute, and a captain who refused to accept done.

Design Specs as Agent Infrastructure

Mar 28, 2026 · 7 min read

Agents building UI from text descriptions produce divergent implementations. Design specs loaded at startup solved this.

What Breaks When You Sprint with 10 AI Agents

Feb 20, 2026 · 5 min read

Wave-based sprint execution across a fleet of machines works until local state drifts from remote. Here is what we learned.

Multi-Model Code Review - Why One AI Isn't Enough

Feb 15, 2026 · 8 min read

Why sending code through multiple AI models with different strengths produces higher-confidence findings than any single model.

Multi-Agent Team Protocols Without Chaos

Jan 20, 2026 · 12 min read

How we coordinate dev agents, PM agents, an advisor, and a human captain using namespaced labels, QA grading, and explicit role boundaries.

Kill Discipline for AI Agent Teams

Jan 17, 2026 · 10 min read

How mandatory stop points prevent the most expensive failure mode in agent-assisted development - silent churn on unsolvable problems.

Ship Log

Jun 21, 2026

Done Means Wired - Shipping the Verify Gate

Apr 23, 2026

Three pipeline failures hiding inside a date fix

Apr 23, 2026

The /eos skill gets a close-out audit and a fabrication gate

Apr 17, 2026

Retiring Stitch from the design stack

Apr 12, 2026

Killing the QA grading theatre

Mar 2, 2026

Wireframes and design specs in the agent workflow

Feb 17, 2026

Making every web app installable in one session

Feb 16, 2026

Building a go-live checklist that tests itself

Feb 15, 2026

Building an editorial pipeline for practitioner content

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