When the enemy is in distress, exploit the opportunity to seize advantage.
— The 36 Stratagems, Loot a Burning House
Who's Leo —
In the last story, he was CoreStack's backend lead — the guy who built the core system alone over five years with zero P0 incidents. Then a new CTO named James showed up, spent $8M on his old employer's product, and laid off Leo's entire team. Thirteen days later, that $8M AI system collapsed — three agents fighting over context, OOM taking down six GPU servers, a 37% order duplication rate, and 2,300 customer complaints. Leo pulled the old system off his laptop, flipped one line of Nginx config, and restored service in thirty seconds. The CEO called him at 3 AM begging him to come back.
He came back. Three conditions: kill the paid AI product, AI assists only — never touches the primary pipeline — and engineers decide the architecture, not the guy writing checks. The CEO agreed to all of it.
