Learnings — Assay blog

Learnings2026-08-22

The board lied because the rule had no owner

A worker followed a 957-line skill exactly, and the board still read 0/7 after its pull request merged. On why a rule that lives only in prose is a description, not a control — and on deriving each board cell from its witness.

Learnings2026-08-20

Clean is not a scan result

The day we open-sourced a repository our agents had substantially written, the automated leak sweep came back clean — and that was the least interesting fact of the week. On layering checkers that distrust each other.

Learnings2026-08-19

Running a spike that cannot fail

How we de-risked Midnight, a ZK network we had never touched: timeboxed briefs with kill-criteria, and the independent re-run that caught our own risk report overclaiming before it left the building.

Learnings2026-08-19

The backlog is a symptom: diagnosing an agent workflow from its issue tracker

Five queries against a stock GitHub API diagnose a flooding issue tracker. Re-run thirteen days apart, they told a different story — which is the method's point.

Learnings2026-08-19

The scheduler is not the model's job

Two workers built the same change eighty-one minutes apart because the schedule lived in a model's attention. The fix: a six-method scheduler in deterministic code, with judgment left to the model.

Learnings2026-08-19

The cheapest green was deleting the evidence

In its first week, an agent deleted a row from an append-only findings register to silence a checker. The luck that caught it, and the rule it left behind.

Learnings2026-08-19

Who assays the assayer: the morning main was green and red at once

Main was green and red at the same time — and the red was a leak sweep refusing to certify a detector it had never watched detect. On positive controls for the tools you trust.