zyad@shehadeh:~$ ls writing/

Writing

Design-engineering notes from personal projects and open tooling — build systems, dependency graphs, artifact provenance, and tooling for LLM agents. Opinionated, concrete, occasionally wrong in instructive ways.

2026
Jun 2, 20264 min read#llm-tooling

Context Is a Budget, Not a Bucket

Every tool you give an LLM agent is a program that spends its working memory on the model's behalf — usually badly. Output shaping, description compression, and the two costs of a wasted token.
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Mar 14, 20265 min read#supply-chain

Signing Without Hermeticity Is Theater

"This artifact came from that commit" decomposes into three claims, and the one nobody can sell you is the one that matters. Why the signature is just the envelope.
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Jan 22, 20265 min read#build-systems

The Dependency Graph Is the Real Artifact

Blast-radius queries, cycle ratchets, critical paths, and diffing edges in code review — four things a file tree structurally cannot tell you.
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2025
Nov 8, 20255 min read#build-systems

Why Build Caches Miss

A cache never misses because it's too small — it misses because you lied to it. Timestamps, absolute paths, env leakage, and the two-build test that catches them all.
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2024
Jan 15, 20243 min read#databases

Storing Tree Relationships in a Table

Adjacency lists, path enumeration, and nested sets: three ways to flatten a tree into rows, and which query each one makes fast.
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Context Is a Budget, Not a Bucket

Signing Without Hermeticity Is Theater

The Dependency Graph Is the Real Artifact

Why Build Caches Miss

Storing Tree Relationships in a Table