Long-form pieces on the architecture nobody is explaining properly. Written by a practitioner, for practitioners.
AI tools have lowered the cost of writing code to near zero. What they haven't changed is which decisions require human judgment — and for builders without engineering backgrounds, the risk is not moving too slowly. It's not knowing which decisions to own.
GitHub Copilot and the Vercel Claude Code plugin both defaulted to collecting developer data in the same week. The exemptions reveal the business model: enterprise users pay in cash, everyone else pays in training data.
AI assistants recommend packages they know, not the simplest solution. For a new generation of builders, that default is creating dependency footprints that more experienced developers would never accumulate.
Retrieval-augmented generation solves a knowledge access problem. Most teams reaching for it are trying to solve an output reliability problem. Those are different problems with different solutions, and confusing them is expensive.
Two separate pressures — sophisticated supply chain attacks and AI-generated contribution noise — are converging on the same person: the individual maintainer holding up infrastructure that millions of projects depend on.
What GraphRAG is, why vector search alone falls short, and when you'd actually reach for it.