I recently added a deduplication safeguard to a queue-driven system. The problem was simple to describe but harder to solve well; many obvious answers turned out to have some bad trade-offs. The setup The system is event-driven. Workers pull messages off an SQS FIFO queue, where each message is grouped by an entity ID. Processing a message may create an “incident” for the entity. The processing flow looks like this: ...
Recently, I encountered a subtle bug in an event-driven system. Looking at the symptoms, the immediate defect looked clear to me but of late, for most bugs, I tend to rubber-duck it with an AI model before I make the fix. In the last few months, I have mostly used Claude but my employer recently rolled out initial support for Codex which also seems to be well regarded in the industry. I decided to do the back-and-forth with both models this time. I did not expect much difference in the results but I was a little curious how Codex would fare against Claude but also wanted to be exhaustive and make sure I don’t miss anything. ...