Blog on Voxell

How We Stopped Lying to Ourselves About Quality

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Test coverage is a proxy. It tells you what lines of code a test runner touched, not whether your product works. A payment system can report 94% coverage while silently dropping charges on every third invoice. A GPU inference API can show all green while its engine health gate is literally just running grep "/healthz" internal/engine/server.go against the source code.

That second one is us. This is the story of how we found it, why it happened, and what we replaced it with.

Vectors Are Not Ontologies

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago I was debugging a search-relevance pipeline backed by a state-of-the-art embedding model. The query was an unambiguous negation; the top result was an unambiguous affirmation; the cosine similarity was 0.92.

You can guess the pair. “I love it” vs “I don’t love it.” Or near enough. The model could distinguish them in some abstract sense — the vectors weren’t identical — but in the only sense that mattered to the pipeline, they were neighbors.

Your Vector Database Is a Coping Mechanism

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In March 2025, a team out of Stanford’s RegLab and Computer Science department published the first preregistered audit of the AI legal research tools that LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Thomson Reuters had been quietly selling into law firms (Magesh et al. 2025). The vendors had promised, in writing, “hallucination-free” output. The empirical reality was that the best of the three was wrong about one in six times, the worst about one in three.

CSSGuard: The Missing Half of CSS Tooling

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Where Did the Breadcrumbs Go?

My wife is a UX designer. She was paging through our new site on her phone when she asked: “What happened to the breadcrumbs? They disappeared.”

I had just finished cleaning up the codebase. Removed dead code, consolidated templates, tidied the CSS. The kind of housekeeping that makes you feel productive.

But somewhere in that cleanup, I broke the breadcrumbs on mobile. No console errors. No failed builds. Our CI was green (55 checks), because this failure mode is structural—HTML still contains the class tokens, but the purge step removed the CSS definitions. The classes were present. The styles just… weren’t.