Between 84 and 95% of developers now use AI weekly — yet a controlled 2025 study found AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower while convincing them they were faster. The productivity story is louder than the productivity itself. This piece unpacks what's really shifting in developer workflows, why prompt engineering depends on engineering, and what separates teams that win with AI from those that just feel like they're winning.

A subtle failure in concurrent WAL writes can silently break durability guarantees. This article explores the “WAL hole problem,” where interrupted or partial writes leave unrecoverable gaps that halt log replay. Learn how this issue arises at the intersection of atomic offsets and non-atomic I/O, and how it was fixed in TidesDB using signal masking and footer-based recovery.

We build software that powers healthcare for over 20 million Kenyans. This is where we share the real engineering behind it, the trade-offs, the hard lessons and the problems worth solving. Welcome to the SIL Engineering Blog.