Posts tagged Kafka — AI × software engineering, made practical.
You will learn what poison messages are, how dead-letter queues work in SQS, RabbitMQ and Kafka, how to alert on and own a DLQ, how to redrive safely, and what changes when the consumer is an LLM agent.
A message queue will hide a dead consumer from you for as long as it takes — here's the six-hour timeline of exactly how, the one metric that would've paged you in minutes instead, and why the same failure is now waiting inside your LLM agent worker pool.
Two writes pretending to be one is the default failure mode of dual-write architectures, and there's a structural fix that makes the drift impossible instead of just rarer.
A dead letter queue nobody reads isn't a safety net, it's a data-loss incident running on a delay — here's the replay path most teams never build, and why agentic pipelines make triage harder, not easier.
A gut-check for engineers who reach for Kafka by default: if the consumer can't perceive the latency win, streaming isn't buying speed, it's buying you an incident channel.