Shibin Das

FlowDrop · 25 Oct 2026 · 12 min

FlowDrop now has a published, implementation-independent workflow specification: 386 rules with permanent identifiers, conformance fixtures, and a clear answer to absent versus null in JSON. Why we pulled the rules out of the Drupal module, and what a written spec fixes that a test suite cannot.

Engineering · 20 Aug 2026 · 14 min

Atelier is built for people who have never heard of Drupal and will never open a terminal. That single fact turns 'it upgrades itself' into a veto over the dependency list — and a refactor where I had to say no to modules we wanted, delete code we were proud of, and start reading other people's roadmaps.

Drupal · 18 Aug 2026 · 5 min

One ring drawn in the wrong place. Chasing it turned into a rewrite — because Drupal stores no parent pointer for revisions, and "parent" means three different things on a translated node.

Engineering · 6 Aug 2026 · 17 min

I gave an AI agent full access to a broken robot. It ran better experiments than I would have, ruled out six causes by measurement, and then wrote 'definitively exonerated' about a part it had no way to inspect. Every correction came from something I knew and it structurally could not — and one of its confident errors nearly went out in a warranty claim.

Engineering · 22 Jul 2026 · 7 min

A recurring claim: 'I added llms.txt and nothing reads it — zero hits.' Almost every time, the zero comes from checking the wrong instrument. Client-side analytics is structurally blind to a plaintext file fetched by a bot. Here's why, and where the real answer lives.

Musing · 18 Jul 2026 · 1 min

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was betting a new product on an unfashionable foundation. It just launched. This is the short, happy note before the longer ones.