Journal
Blog
Thoughts on AI, WordPress, and building things that last.
-
Forty per cent
I asked the AI to upgrade PHP on one server. It upgraded all of them. Not maliciously. Not even incorrectly, in a narrow sense — the PHP version was the same across the fleet, so technically it did the job. But I had asked it to start with one site, check that it worked, and…
-
Push Back Until It Tells You the Truth
I asked Claude a direct question: has something happened to the German DNS system? The answer was no. It was wrong. This is what happened next.
-
The night I locked myself out of my own server by doing what an AI told me to do
I asked an AI agent to make one of my servers more secure. It had suggested the approach itself, the reasoning seemed sound, and I told it to go ahead. I mean the strategy it suggested sounded plausible. What it didn’t tell me — and what I had no reason to anticipate — was the…
-
Every time I sat down to work, I had to start from the beginning. It took me a while to understand why.
The story I was building a website for a client who sells courses. The structure of the data was specific — some courses had one instructor, some had several, some instructors taught one course, some taught many. I was trying to find a way for visitors to search and navigate all of this easily. The…
-
I spent two months building an AI agent to manage my server. The first three weeks were a waste of time. Here is why.
The story I set out to build a system that would monitor my server and fix problems by itself. The idea was reasonable enough — if something went wrong at three in the morning, the agent would identify it and deal with it without waking anyone up. I asked the AI to design the monitoring…
-
Something deleted all my API keys. I still don’t know exactly how. Here is why it didn’t matter — and why it easily could have.
The story One day I opened my working environment to find that a file containing all my API keys had disappeared. Not moved. Not corrupted. Gone. I had no clear explanation for what had happened. The AI agent had autonomous access to the filesystem, and the file was no longer there. Whether it deleted the…
-
My WordPress sites were silently degrading for weeks. One wrong assumption caused it.
The story When I migrated six WordPress sites from one server to another, I asked Claude Code whether everything had been set up correctly. It said yes. It hadn’t. Redis — the caching layer that sits between WordPress and the database, and whose job is to store frequently requested data so the database doesn’t have…
-
My server documentation used to go out of date the moment I finished writing it. I think I’ve found a way around that.
The story There are two ways a documentation system can fail you. The first is that the AI simply doesn’t know what it’s working with. So instead of getting on with the job, it starts exploring — poking around, reading things it should already know, trying to piece together a picture of the situation from…
-
I started asking one AI tool to check another’s work. Here is what I found.
The story I had asked Claude Code to tidy up the audit system on my server — a collection of scripts that run several hundred checks to ensure the server is configured correctly and securely. It came back with a reasonable plan, carried it out, and reported that everything was in order. I was still…