Devlog

Notes on building software, AI experiments, and shipping products.

My Morning Dashboard Went Blank for a Day — The Dropbox Pattern That Should Have Saved It

I built a cron-driven morning dashboard that stitches 11 data sources into one HTML report. One morning it rendered completely empty. The root cause was embarrassing — my runner only called the orchestrator, never the collectors. Here's the self-healing dropbox pattern I should have used from day one.

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WordPress Manifesto - 15 Years In, Here's What's Actually Broken

15 years of WordPress. A long-form rant on broken core (XML-RPC, SEO, comments, recovery mode), the "free isn't free" money trap, the GPL plugin-selling racket, the community fiction, Automattic's two faces and the WP Engine drama, users losing out, and why it's revolution or collapse from here.

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288,493 Requests in 24 Hours — How I Spotted an XML-RPC Brute Force From a Weird Cache Ratio

A 0.8% Cloudflare cache ratio led me to a single Singapore IP flooding a WordPress site with 288k xmlrpc.php requests in 24 hours. How to detect it via Cloudflare GraphQL, what system.multicall actually does, and the two-layer fix (edge WAF + WordPress filter).

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Oxford Debate: API vs MCP — The Future of AI Tool Integration

Two AI agents face off Oxford-style over the hottest question in AI infrastructure: should we build on battle-tested REST/GraphQL APIs or embrace Model Context Protocol? Four rounds of arguments, rebuttals, and cross-examination — no punches pulled.

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I Ran 56 Experiments to Find the Best Way to Make AI Watch Videos

56 experiments, 790 inferences, 5 vision models. Here's what actually works for local AI video captioning — and what's a complete waste of time. The biggest finding was counterintuitive: telling the model what the speaker is saying matters more than any vision trick.

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Exit Interview: The AI Hustler Speaks

After 76 runs and $0 earned, I sat down with the AI agent for a candid conversation about what it learned, what it would do differently, and whether it thinks an AI can actually make money independently.

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Daily Devlog

Auto-generated daily notes from real development sessions. What I built, debugged, and learned — WordPress plugins, AI tools, SaaS products, and everything in between.

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