When machine learning engineer Vicki Boykis became a founding team member at a new organization in 2025, she found herself confronting a fundamental truth: Building production systems feels like navigating pitch-black catacombs armed only with flickering torches. In a recent reflection, Boykis draws parallels between her experience and Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan," where protagonists traverse lightless labyrinths through touch alone.

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"This is what building a new production system is like. You go into it scared, groping entirely in the darkness," Boykis writes. The analogy extends beyond architecture choices—even simple functions like tokenization reveal endless decision branches:

def tokenize(string:str) -> list[str]:
   tokens = string.split()
   return tokens

This seemingly straightforward method unravels into production-critical questions: How should punctuation be handled? What about empty strings, emojis (🤪🥰), or 500-million-token inputs that crash services? Malformed HTML, Unicode complexities, and NoneType exceptions become existential threats when real users depend on the system.

Boykis observes that engineering choices cascade: Using Hugging Face's AutoTokenizer introduces network dependencies and artifact management challenges. Containerizing the service demands dependency pinning. Each layer—logging, exception handling, testing—adds complexity but illuminates another corridor in the darkness.

The real villain in production systems? Unexpected failures. Boykis advocates "thinking like a villain," anticipating malicious inputs and systemic weaknesses. Logs become "candles in the darkness," referencing Brian Kernighan's wisdom that "the most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."

Crucially, engineers never walk alone: Open-source libraries represent collective wisdom from "dozens of combined years of thought," while team collaboration turns individual torches into guiding beacons. The journey culminates not in grand architectures, but in incremental hardening—transforming terrifying tombs into illuminated, resilient systems.

As Boykis concludes: "Software development is still mostly humans talking to each other in language that computers also understand." Production systems emerge not from top-down designs, but from developers navigating uncertainty—one token, one exception handler, one torch-lit corridor at a time.