Hello, HellGatesPostmortem of a year-unsolved gate-level crackme that GPT-6 cracked in minutes

xutaxkamay recounts designing HellGates—a VHDL custom CPU with obfuscation, anti-tamper, and anti-debug that stumped humans and LLMs for a year—until GPT-6 solved it in under half an hour, then walks through what actually broke.

Case study · Security · Hardware · Benchmarks · AI

How we tracked down a 16-year-old SQLite bugOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary

Alex Chan recounts the investigation of repeated Tailscale outages that exposed a long-standing SQLite bug. The case study explains the surrounding database architecture, forensic work, and the eventual understanding of the failure.

Case study · SQLite · Debugging

Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory LeakOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary

Mitchell Hashimoto traces a substantial memory leak in Ghostty to its terminal-content data structures. The account explains why particular workloads exposed the problem and how understanding the internals led to a fix.

Case study · Debugging · Memory Management

Taming A Voracious Rust ProxyOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary

Peter Cai investigates a CPU-hungry failure in Fly.io's Rust routing proxy. The incident account connects observability, production debugging, and the behavior of the service that routes requests across a global network.

Case study · Rust · Debugging