It was 11 PM. I was watching Grimm.
While Nick Burkhardt was hunting monsters on screen, a monster started waking up in my head:
"What if AI-assisted development suddenly ends tomorrow?"
An email from management: "Costs are too high. We're cutting AI. Starting tomorrow, back to classic development."
And you're the developer who's been telling AI "write this for me" for the past 2 years.
When's the last time you drew a transaction boundary? When's the last time you ran EXPLAIN ANALYZE? Can you debug a deadlock without AI holding your hand? Can you spot an N+1 query just by reading the code?
I couldn't sleep that night. So I started writing.
What Is This Series?
Back to Code is a 15-episode technical novel about a fictional B2B logistics company called LogiFlow — and their painful journey from AI-generated code back to real software engineering.
The characters:
- Defne — Staff Engineer. The one who saw it coming.
- Kerem — CTO. The one who sold the AI dream.
- Emre — Senior Developer. The one who trusted the machine.
The story starts with a $114,500 AI infrastructure bill and a Black Friday crash — and unfolds into 15 weeks of technical reckoning.
Every episode is built around a real production pattern that AI gets wrong:
| Episode | The Failure | The Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 50K concurrent ops crash PostgreSQL | AI Concurrency Blindness |
| 02 | Business logic buried in infra calls | Hexagonal Architecture |
| 03 | 98% coverage but broken business rules | TDD & Tautological Tests |
| 04 | 18-second page load from clean code | Big O & N+1 Queries |
| 05 | One class serving 4 different domains | DDD & Bounded Contexts |
| 06 | Customer charged twice on network retry | Idempotency |
| 07 | Green tests, broken staging | Testcontainers |
| 08 |
as any hiding runtime bombs |
Zod & Runtime Validation |
| 09 | 45-min test suite nobody runs | Flaky Tests & Determinism |
| 10 | User input straight into SQL | Input Sanitization |
| 11 | "Let's rewrite everything" | Strangler Fig Pattern |
| 12 | console.log everywhere, answers nowhere | OpenTelemetry |
| 13 | One service down, all services down | Kafka & Event-Driven |
| 14 | "The code is ugly" doesn't fly in board meetings | DORA Metrics |
| 15 | The reckoning | The Manifesto |
Why I Wrote This
I've been in software engineering for 25 years. Three startups, one exit. I've seen hype cycles come and go.
AI made coding free. But it made software engineering — the design, the context, the failure modes, the architecture — more expensive than ever.
The gap between "code that compiles" and "system that works in production" has never been wider. This series is my attempt to map that gap, episode by episode, bug by bug.
Coding became a commodity. But thinking is more expensive than ever.
Read the Series
- Episode 01: The Invoice of Illusion and the Black Friday Crash
- Episode 02: Autopsy — The Lie That Looked Flawless
- Episode 03: The Lost Craft — TDD and False Confidence
- Episode 04: Forgetting the Machine — Big O and the Performance Tax
- Episode 05: The Revenge of Context — DDD and Bounded Contexts
- Episode 06: State Hell and Idempotency
- Episode 07: The Lies of Mocks — Reality with Testcontainers
- Episode 08: The Illusion of Type Safety
- Episode 09: CI/CD Pipeline and Flaky Tests
- Episode 10: The Security Vulnerability Factory
- Episode 11: The Legacy Code Mine — Strangler Fig Pattern
- Episode 12: Observability — From Log Spaghetti to Traces
- Episode 13: Event-Driven Architecture — Kafka and the Async World
- Episode 14: Technical Debt Credit Score — Measuring the Unmeasurable
- Episode 15: The New Manifesto — Master and Apprentice (Season Finale)
Each episode works standalone — pick the topic that interests you. But if you start from Episode 1, you'll follow the full arc from crash to manifesto.
May the power of the keyboard be with you.
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