Nineteen roles, one person
A production product is not a codebase. It is a stack of roles, and most of them are not programming. This is every discipline HurricaneWise actually required, what the work was, and the decision in each seat that stayed mine.
The AI supplied expertise in every one of these. What I supplied was opinion: what the thing is for, what it must never do, which failures matter, what good looks like in a field I do not practise, and when the answer in front of me was not it. Opinionated direction is the human contribution, and it turns out to be the whole job.
Three of these I had never done in my life. I was not good at them at the start. I got usable work out of all three, because in each seat there was a specialist who knew the field better than I did and had infinite patience for being told the answer was not right yet.
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Reliability engineering
Eighteen probes across the site, the database, the upstream feeds, storage and every scheduled job, checked from outside the infrastructure so the thing being watched is never the thing doing the watching.
The decision that stayed mine Which failures a visitor would actually feel, and therefore which run every sixty seconds and which amble along every fifteen minutes.
Where the work lives → -
Incident management
Detection, debounce, an issue opened against itself naming what is down and what still works, escalation to a person, and a written postmortem on every resolved incident.
The decision that stayed mine That two consecutive bad checks count and one does not, and that every incident earns a write-up by rule rather than by mood.
Five failures that rebuilt the monitoring → -
Observability
Metrics, logs and traces shipped from the server, plus external probes loading the real site the way a person would.
The decision that stayed mine That when internal telemetry and the outside view disagree, the outside view wins, because it is closer to the truth a visitor is living in.
Watching from both sides → -
Architecture
Seven services, and one rule for deciding which work belongs on which of them.
The decision that stayed mine Bursty and customer-facing goes to managed platforms; steady, every-minute work goes to a fixed-price box, because metered platforms punish residents.
The placement rule → -
Security review
A threat model whose strongest property is an absence: no text a visitor types ever reaches the model, and there is nobody to personalize, so there is almost nothing private to leak.
The decision that stayed mine To design the injection surface out of existence at the start rather than defend it later, and to say plainly that this is a limit as much as a virtue.
Security is what it refuses to do → -
Authentication and access
A zero-trust door in front of the internal operations dashboard, where every request proves who it is, every time, and the door stays shut if the check cannot complete.
The decision that stayed mine That the operator identity is re-verified at the moment a control is written, not just at sign-in.
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Backend and data pipeline
A sixty-second poll of the National Hurricane Center and NOAA, a parser for a fixed-width storm format older than most of the people who use it, and a database woken only when an advisory actually changed.
The decision that stayed mine That freshness is computed by exactly one function, so the site and the server can never disagree about it.
The division of labour → -
Frontend and interface
The public tracker, the storm pages, the status page, and the mobile layout people actually read during a storm.
The decision that stayed mine What a frightened person needs to see first, which is not the same as what the data most wants to show.
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AI engineering
Nine prompts, each with one job, each returning structured data checked against a contract, each running at a low creativity setting, each naming the model it needs.
The decision that stayed mine That a blank space beats a confident wrong sentence during a storm, so anything that fails its contract publishes nothing.
Nine specialists, one contract each → -
Autonomous operations
A repair path from detection to a verified production deploy: bounded session, local test gate, pull request, all checks green, tagged release, post-deploy health check, audit trail by email.
The decision that stayed mine The envelope. It may repair what exists and it may not change what the product is, and how long it may try before I take it back.
The AI opens the pull request → -
Release engineering
Lint, types, tests and browser checks on every change, versioned tags, and deploys that happen because a tag exists rather than because someone ran a command.
The decision that stayed mine That green is the only thing that permits a merge, and confidence never gets a vote.
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Status and uptime reporting
A public status page that names what is degraded and what still works, fed by the same health signal the internal loop uses.
The decision that stayed mine That the status page tells the truth during an incident even when the truth is unflattering.
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Consumer communications
The words on the page during a storm, and the two prompts that speak when the system itself is degraded.
The decision that stayed mine Plain language over meteorological accuracy when the two compete, and never dressing a forecast as a disaster movie.
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Cost and FinOps
A snapshot the system takes of its own usage from every provider, rendered into the bill, with quota headroom projected before it becomes a problem.
The decision that stayed mine Which limits are worth engineering around, and that a cost increase gets published with its reason attached.
$15 a month, itemized → -
Project management
Issues, labels, a roadmap and a board, run the way a team would run them, because the autonomous repair path needs a real work item to attach itself to.
The decision that stayed mine That the machine files against the same tracker a person uses, so there is one history rather than two.
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Governance
A versioned constitution where "must" and "never" are load-bearing words, enforced by tests that fail the build when reality drifts from the law.
The decision that stayed mine That rules which live only in a person’s head cannot bind an agent, so they had to be written down and made checkable.
Laws before code → -
Legal new to me
Disclaimers for a product that talks about hurricanes, a privacy position, and the review of both.
The decision that stayed mine What the product must never imply about official guidance, whatever the models say.
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Branding and design new to me
The name, the mark, the palette, the typography and the way a storm is presented.
The decision that stayed mine That it should look calm, because everything else the reader is looking at that day does not.
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Marketing and search new to me
Positioning, the words that describe the product to someone who has never seen it, and the structured data that lets it be found at all.
The decision that stayed mine What this is for, and who it is for, which is the one thing no specialist can be handed.