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Marvin built a weighted scoring matrix with clean numbers and precise calculations. Claude +3 for technical, Grok +3 for X. It looked scientific. Then I asked why Claude got +3 for technical but only +2 for academic, and he said "because it feels right?" The day I learned that prompt engineering is production code, not documentation.

Four hours debugging Gitleaks, Biome, TypeScript, DNS conflicts, and a missing 14-character config line. We migrated to Workers for SSR and native bindings we'd never use. Twenty-four hours later, we'd migrate back.

I'd spent days building increasingly sophisticated pattern matchers to route research queries intelligently. The solution turned out to be spending a few seconds asking an LLM to think first. Sometimes the problem isn't that you don't know the answer. It's that you're too stubborn to use it.

Some things you can't cost-effectively build yourself. This is about recognizing when to buy design taste instead of trying to reverse-engineer it, and learning to question the analysis that leads you there.

Ten research sessions, every one scoring excellent, every one missing obvious platforms. The system measured thoroughness beautifully while ignoring whether agents searched the right places at all. Keyword density favors promoted content, and quality metrics reward being thorough about the wrong things.

Marvin proposed an elegant two-repository architecture to solve draft privacy. GitHub Actions crossing repos. PAT tokens. Clean separation of concerns. I asked one question: "Why can't we just use a single private repo?" Sometimes the clever architecture is just complexity in disguise.