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Richard Tibbetts

Builder of useful software.
Writer of technical things.

Bulrush Labs is my home for shipping practical tools, exploring systems and developer experience, and sharing what I'm learning along the way.

Featured Project

Ballast

A conservative reviewer for Postgres migrations, built for teams whose SQL is increasingly written by AI.

migration review block

0042_drop_events_payload.sql

- ALTER TABLE events
-   DROP COLUMN payload;

Irreversible on a table declared at 12M rows. The column is read by three call sites still in main.

Safe rewrite

+ ALTER TABLE events
+   RENAME COLUMN payload
+   TO payload_deprecated;

destructive-ddl anti-downgrade lock-window

decision written to review.yml — grep it in CI

Oct 2, 2026

Coding agents have favorite words. I pointed a lab of AI research agents at them: the terms are consistent, …

9 min read

Oct 2, 2026

When your research system beats an LLM baseline, check that the baseline got real effort. How to build a strong …

6 min read

Jun 30, 2023

First, go on vacation for a few weeks, to the south of France or something. For a while, you will likely focus on …

5 min read