Local Reasoning · The app died at Red Rocks while its health checks stayed green. Scale is a property of sums, and nothing in the loop was ever charged with a sum.

In this blog post, I look at the night my agent-built app collapsed in front of its largest crowd, and at what a census taken afterward says about every surface that has not collapsed yet. Zabriskie is a social app I am building around music, films, books, art, and the people who care about them. I am building the entire application through vibe coding: I describe the behavior I want and evaluate the product in the browser, but I don’t read the implementation code. Coding agents write the implementation, the tests, and the audits, and more than one vendor’s, Claude Code and Cursor and Codex have all merged work here. Every change lands the same way, as a pull request reviewed by other agents as a diff and approved by me on its evidence, screenshots, benchmarks, described behavior, never the code. The repository is private, so the PR numbers scattered through this post are receipts for my own record rather than links. On the evening of August 28 I was at Red Rocks for the second of two…