The four heights
The same task, four distances: today's deadline, the next reviewer, the stuck moment, the pattern.
Execute — do the immediate task
+A legacy asset container currently relies on the default shallow copy and leaks GPU handles when…
Execute — do the immediate task
+A legacy asset container currently relies on the default shallow copy and leaks GPU handles when duplicated. Implement a copy constructor for Mesh that performs deep copy of vertex buffers and duplicates GPU references correctly, leaves both objects usable, and documents the cost. Add unit tests that copy a mesh and then destroy the original to confirm the copy remains valid. Ladder L1
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Improve — make it easier to accept
+Before I add explicit copy constructors for resource classes, prepare the change to make reviewers…
Improve — make it easier to accept
+Before I add explicit copy constructors for resource classes, prepare the change to make reviewers comfortable. Show which members need deep copy versus shared ownership, put the expensive operations and their costs up front, and flag places where copying should be prohibited instead of copied. Ladder L2
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Decide — diagnose the stuck moment
+A crash happened when two Mesh instances, one copied from the other, were destroyed; I suspect the…
Decide — diagnose the stuck moment
+Someone copied a Mesh and then the renderer crashed when both were destroyed
A crash happened when two Mesh instances, one copied from the other, were destroyed; I suspect the copy constructor performed a shallow copy of the GPU handle. I cannot tell whether other code depends on copy semantics being deep. What is the likely root cause and the safest immediate fix to prevent double-free, and how to audit other copies in the codebase? Ladder L5
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Become — change the pattern
+Historically the codebase lets heavy resource objects be implicitly copyable, causing crashes and…
Become — change the pattern
+We routinely accept implicit copies of heavy objects and later get performance or correctness bugs
Historically the codebase lets heavy resource objects be implicitly copyable, causing crashes and performance issues as teams duplicate meshes or textures without thinking. What habit should we change across the team: should we make resource types non-copyable by default, document copy costs, add tooling or linters to detect accidental copies, and how to migrate existing code with minimal churn? Ladder L6
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Next to this one
Other programming language work people do in C++.
Every task here came from the work, not from a feature list — which is why the prompts name what you want done and never the button that does it. The tool changes; the work does not.
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The rest of the map
Same library, five ways in.