The ongoing conversation
An urgent PHP security alert arrived on October 21, 2026. Working with Codex, I checked which of the sites I maintain were affected, then authorized the repairs for this website, Dayton Hash, its staging environment, and the Miami Valley Orienteering Club. Those four website environments turned into five places to fix when I followed the […]
A review queue can fit neatly on a phone and still leave the reviewer guessing which item to open. Hiding a column solves the space problem; whether it solves the user’s problem depends on what was in the column. In the Grand Comics Database‘s Changes Under Review queue, the State column disappeared on narrow screens, […]
A website rewrite can give its users a familiar screen and leave its next maintainer with an unfamiliar application. Someone still has to find the rule behind a wrong number, work out why a save failed, and make the next change without breaking the last one. That person belongs in the framework discussion. In the […]
If the AI assistant won’t load during a workshop, the participants should still have something useful to do. That means preparing an exercise they can finish without the assistant, with the sources and materials available outside the service that just stopped cooperating. Start with what the participants are supposed to learn. Reviewing a draft against […]
Watergate happened in 1972. Disney+ launched in 2019. I’m going to start somewhere in the middle, with the publication of Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions in 1982. (I had reached that series in a read-through of some of the comic book collected editions I started acquiring during the pandemic shutdown.) Follow along! Contest of […]
When a server is nearly full, a directory called “old” starts to look helpful. It might contain something removable. Or it might contain the only copy of something we still need; the person who named it has left us an adjective, not a retention policy. In a shared-server cleanup last month, I set the preservation […]
CareerTrellis is available in open beta, bringing job discovery, application materials, tracking, and interview preparation into one workspace. AI features require your own provider API credentials; separate provider charges may apply.
“Please review” can mean anything from “check the spelling” to “find the assumption that will leave twelve volunteers standing outside a locked building”. If we expect someone to approve AI-assisted work, we need to tell them what requires a decision and give them enough information to make it. That starts before the prompt. Who will […]
An empty attendance list can mean that nobody came or that nobody entered the attendance. A report that displays zero has chosen one of those explanations; it needs a reason. That distinction comes up in the reporting work for the Dayton Hash website. The pilot’s test cases distinguish confirmed empty attendance from unknown rosters and […]
In Give Your AI Agent a Friction Log, I described recording unexpected failures and what actually resolved them. I’ve since added maintained procedures, helper scripts, and focused skills to that workflow. The next question is whether another task finds and uses them. A growing collection of instructions can also become a growing collection of instructions […]