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Thoughts on software, tools, and building things that work.
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1–12 of 26- 7 min read
What Is Compaction in AI?
Part of the AI Explained series
Compaction is what happens when your AI tool runs out of room to remember. It shrinks the conversation history to keep going — but the important parts don't always survive.
- 7 min read
Your Clients Know You're Lying About Incident Reports
When your organization calls a misconfiguration an 'attack' or spins a three-month infrastructure failure as a 'security upgrade,' your clients aren't fooled. They're just deciding whether to say something.
- 11 min read
Every Management Failure Is a Retrieval Failure
The information existed. Someone knew. The failure was that knowledge couldn't reach the person who needed it, when they needed it. The fix isn't 'communicate better' — it's building retrieval infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans remembering to use it.
- 5 min read
Latency Kills Curiosity
The same pattern that bounces a visitor from a slow website also erodes curiosity in careers, teams, and minds. Latency isn't just page speed. It's any friction between a person and the thing they're trying to explore.
- 8 min read
The Craftsperson's Tools: Who Owns the AI Governance Docs You Built?
Part of the Cognitive Property series
Your AI governance frameworks encode how you think into portable files. The employer owns the output — but the tools? Where you build them determines who keeps them.
- 8 min read
I Used WordPress for 20 Years and I Was Wrong
After two decades building sites on WordPress — from personal blogs to corporate platforms — I switched to Astro. Here's why the move to static site generation changed everything about how I build for the web.
- 10 min read
Local RAG for Claude Code: Semantic Search Over Your Own Project
Claude Code has session memory and governance documents, but on a project with five hundred markdown files, the gap between what the agent can read at startup and what the project actually knows gets wider every week. pmem is a local RAG memory system that gives Claude Code persistent, semantic search across your project's full history. No external APIs. Setup in two minutes.
- 5 min read
Why Your Page Builder Site Goes White After a Cache Purge
Page builders generate CSS on first render and cache it on disk. When your cache purges, the CSS isn't there yet. The next visitor gets a white page. I built a WordPress plugin to fix the three failure modes that cause it.
- 7 min read
The Discovery Tax
Discovery phases feel expensive. Skipping them is more expensive. Every 'just build it' directive is a bet that you understand the problem completely before starting. That bet almost never pays.
- 5 min read
The Green-Light Problem
The most expensive mistake in platform migrations isn't choosing the wrong platform. It's recommending one before you've validated the assumptions the recommendation depends on. A green light with unresolved checkpoints isn't a recommendation — it's a liability.
- 6 min read
SideMark: Building a Markdown Editor for Two Authors
Every markdown editor assumes one author. When AI agents became co-editors, the 'file changed on disk' dialog became a workflow killer. SideMark is what happens when you solve that problem from the inside.
- 5 min read
Why AI Persona Switching Doesn't Work as Code Review
Asking Claude to 'switch to CEO mode' for a second opinion feels like independent review — but shared context means the reviewer already knows the answers. Here's what actually breaks and what to do instead.