DISPATCHES FROM THE MICROSOFT AI ECOSYSTEM
9 posts
This final article puts the rewrite to a real test: production-scale volume, an actual Task Reviewer pass that catches something the earlier work missed, and a benchmark that settles whether the win holds up once the row count moves from a few hundred to over ten thousand.
This article puts Hyper-Velocity Engineering to work on a complex rewrite: turning the RBAR cursor we described in the previous article, "Temporal Tables in a Real Database (Not a Toy Example)", into a single set-based query, without breaking the loader downstream.
WideWorldImporters ships with temporal tables that version themselves for free, no ETL code required. But there's a catch: the built-in syntax can tell you what a row looked like at any moment, and nothing about what changed since your last load. This article digs into that gap, and the two pieces of hand-written logic WideWorldImporters uses to bridge it.
Everyone's demoing Hypervelocity Engineering with 3x velocity numbers and a "30% of Microsoft's code is agent-written" line nobody can source. Here's what's actually underneath it: a four-agent workflow that won't let AI write code until it's done its homework, plus the install method most writeups get wrong (hint: it's not just VS Code).
Eighty-eight percent of AI agent pilots never reach production. The usual explanation is governance. The real one is simpler: the model can't tell the difference between investigating a problem and solving it. Microsoft's own engineering framework names the fix, and it's not a smarter model. It's a narrower agent: block implementation during research, force every plan to cite its evidence, and never let context pile up silently across phases. Skip any one of those, and you get an agent that looks like it's following your process right up until it quietly isn't.
No stakeholders, no deadlines, no Jira tickets. Just you and a dumb idea that might turn into something.
The best developer tools do one thing well and get out of your way. A love letter to focused software.
Static sites aren't a step backwards. They're what you get when you take performance and simplicity seriously.
The frameworks will change. The databases will change. What survives is the clarity of your thinking.