When Reconciling Twice Costs Money: CRDs, Providers, and Content-Addressed Fingerprints
Part 1 was about the week before any code: research, positioning, naming, governance. This part is the code. The thing that makes this a useful way to learn the operator pattern is the constraint. Most operator tutorials reconcile something free. If your reconcile loop runs twice when it should run once, nothing happens, nobody notices. Here, an unnecessary reconcile can mean an unnecessary LLM call, and unnecessary LLM calls are exactly the failure mode documented in the incumbents: 164 findings turning into 9,300 model calls in three days. ...