Writing

Verified re-derivation, in the open.

Notes from building rederive — the trust-nothing package manager, the SIR contract format, and what happens to code when you squeeze the uncertainty out of it.

Launch week — following Friday's essay on vibeless coding, one post a day Mon–Fri: the reveal, a real bug, brownfield, greenfield, and the spec underneath it all.
Mon · 1 of 5 · 2026-07-06 · 6 min

rederive is live: verify what a package does, not who published it

The infrastructure behind Friday's essay. The registry hands you bytes and a name to trust; rederive ships the contract instead — a spec and a held-out oracle the publisher can't move. Plus three things you can run right now.

Tue · 2 of 5 · bug-finding

Your tests pass. Would they notice if the code was wrong?

97% line coverage, a green suite, millions of weekly downloads — and a real bug none of it could see. What characterization testing finds that coverage misses.

Wed · 3 of 5 · brownfield

Modernize legacy code without changing what it does

A 2,000-line module, no tests, nobody left who understands it. Keep the original running as the oracle, refactor into clean units, and prove the behavior is unchanged.

Thu · 4 of 5 · greenfield

Verifying code that has no reference

When there's no original to execute, where does the oracle come from? Property oracles, decompose-to-named-leaves, and the discipline of sourcing truth for brand-new code.

Fri · 5 of 5 · the spec

The contract underneath it all

SIR: a language-neutral behavioral contract that lets a JavaScript function be re-derived in Rust and proven identical. The format, the invariants, and why the oracle is the substrate.

Prologue · 2026-07-03 · 5 min

Vibe coding, minus the vibes

The essay that opened the week. An AI wrote this Rust; a reviewer called it gorgeous. Vibe is uncertainty made visible — remove the freedom and the slop disappears.

Essay · 2026-07-02 · 6 min

colors.js had a trusted maintainer. That was the problem.

Every supply-chain defense we've built verifies the pipeline. None of it verifies the payload. What a held-out oracle catches that provenance can't.