2026
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The Agentic Harness Problem: Why AI Agents Need Better Guardrails Than Code Reviews
Mar 23
AI coding agents are prolific. They’re also unsupervised interns who will happily polish a bonus feature while the core product sits unfinished. A real-world retrospective on building tss-ceremony with agentic AI — and the harness improvements that came out of it.
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The Upfront Investment That Saves 10,000 Hours
Mar 11
There’s a pattern in tech where people mock the setup cost of automation without accounting for the return. I spent a day building a Grunt-based WordPress bootstrapper in 2013. Fortune 500 companies are still running code built on that foundation today.
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From Defense AI Drift to Policy Enforcement: Why I Built Firebreak
Feb 28
I wrote earlier about why defense AI companies drift toward offensive applications. Today for a hackathon I built the engineering solution I wish had existed when I was inside that world. Firebreak is a policy-as-code enforcement proxy that makes pre-negotiated AI boundaries hold — automatically, at machine speed, with full audit trails.
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AI Slop and the em-dash
Feb 27
There’s a common perception that em-dashes may indicate AI-generated writing. But for those of us who use tools like WordPress for publishing … we might be using em-dashes regularly without even knowing. Our tools polish our typography, letting us focus on the content. While em-dashes can signal professionalism, they shouldn’t be solely equated with AI…
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The Gravity Problem: Why Defense AI Companies Drift Toward Offense
Feb 26
The Secretary of Defense has pressured Anthropic to permit military use of its AI for “all lawful purposes,” threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act. Anthropic refuses to enable mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, highlighting the industry’s shift from defensive to offensive applications. The situation reflects broader challenges in maintaining ethical AI boundaries amidst government…
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PHP Tek 2026: Kubernetes and Semantic Search for PHP Developers
Jan 26
In May, I’ll present two talks at PHP Tek. The first focuses on streamlining production deployments. The second on AI-powered semantic search in Laravel. Connect with me at the conference!
2025
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Your Return-to-Office Policy is Killing Your AI Strategy
Sept 9
Organizations struggling to trust and manage remote workers will find themselves completely unprepared for the autonomous nature of AI agents. The same control issues that drive return-to-office mandates will cripple AI adoption.
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Signal vs. Noise: How AI Slop Kills Conversation
Jul 24
AI-generated content is everywhere. It’s flooding our professional networks. Destroying social media. Filling news feeds. Each with generic, templated posts that follow predictable patterns. AI slop destroys meaningful discourse and makes it harder than ever to find authentic insights. But the patterns make it easy to find and ignore.
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The Deceptive Promise of AI
Jun 26
The promise of AI automating mundane tasks seems appealing but is fundamentally flawed. It may eliminate boring jobs, but it doesn’t provide economic security. Displaced workers will be forced to seek new employment. This will turn creative passions into money-making endeavors, stripping them of their joy.
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Technology has gotten dumber
Feb 14
I was searching Digital Ocean’s website for a specific product. I found it! Except, it doesn’t actually exist. It seems technology has just gotten dumber over time …
2019
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RingCentral Game Changers: Transcription with Rev.ai
Oct 3
Today we learn how to automatically transcribe incoming audio messages into text using Rev.ai. This will allow us to leverage text-based categorization and sentiment analysis tools!
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RingCentral Game Changers: MonkeyLearn
Oct 2
Our virtual voicemail assistant needs a brain. Setting up MonkeyLearn’s default classifiers, testing them against posts from this blog, and calling the API from Python for the RingCentral Game Changers challenge.