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Journal.
Why humility is a core design skill.
My mentor used to say humility would serve us better. Building a complex business workflow showed me what he meant: great design is invisible.
CLI first, how orbit rows extend your preferred AI tools.
Why I’m proposing a command-line interface for Orbit Rows, bringing data operations into the AI tools people already use.
Before building what ai suggests, ask what the project needs.
Claude proposed a full change history for OrbitRows. Asking what the product had to guarantee led to a much smaller promise.
When one sentence holds several changes.
OrbitRows can now turn a request that chains several changes, with exceptions and limits, into one formula. Here is how that step was rebuilt, and how it scored on sentences it had never seen.
From one sentence to a controlled data change.
How OrbitRows now carries one instruction through seven steps to SQL that can be checked before it runs, and what testing it against direct SQL showed.
Why is a simple data change so hard?
I set out to turn chat prompts into SQL. Experimenting showed me the real job: changes to your data that are fast, accurate, reviewable and recoverable.