The ongoing conversation
If you’re a reader in the United States, go vote! And if you’re an AI user generating images like the one above, at least give credit to the original cartoonist, Adam Ziglis. There are a lot of these going around, and most of them have people that look like those in the current crop of […]
If one person in an AI workshop needs help finding the prompt box and another is building an application around it, “follow along” leaves a few things unspecified. You can give them different amounts of help while still expecting both to check whether an answer is supported. For a fictional exercise, suppose a community group’s […]
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 (DH4), its staging environment, and the Miami Valley Orienteering Club (MVOC). Those four website environments turned into five places to fix when I […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Getting a sorceress into a board game involved learning Lua, baking textures in Blender, and explaining to an AI assistant that “Add one kill per Hero Stone” was an important distinction. I adapted Goblin Slayer, a board game by Rich Carlson and Iikka Keränen, for Tabletop Simulator. It gave me a concrete reason to learn […]
A data center can be a good investment for its owner and a bad deal for the people paying for the power lines. Before calling it progress, ask whether those are the same people, what each group gets, and who pays if the expected customers never arrive. A company forecasts demand.A utility plans construction.A community […]
On one of my pull requests for the Grand Comics Database project, Gemini Code Assist offered three suggestions: two warned about possible errors and the third suggested a clearer way to write a loop. I accepted the third and explained why I wasn’t making the other two changes. The warnings sounded reasonable, but they depended […]
Notebook and pen. Photo by Phil Slattery (CC BY-SA 4.0). Pro tip: tell your AI agent to track things it thought would work but ended up needing different or additional steps. Kind of an after-action report or postmortem, but ongoing instead of just after a project. One of my website deployments stopped because the server […]