AI in Practice
What actually worked, what did not, and what it cost - from real projects rather than from announcements, with the failures left in.
In this section
Search these 18 posts
Everything in this section
09/27/2026
Fake AI Crawler User Agents in Nine Days of Server Logs
Nine days of server logs, one odd day, and AI crawler names that were rare visitors or not who they said they were.
09/27/2026
llms.txt: "File does not appear to contain any links"
Lighthouse fails an llms.txt with no Markdown links. Bare URLs and autolinks don't count. Here is the exact check it runs, and the fix.
09/27/2026
What AI Crawlers Do With robots.txt: Nine Days of Logs
How often each AI crawler rereads robots.txt, which ones mostly read nothing else, and which never ask for it under their own name.
09/24/2026
Who's Crawling Us? An AI Bot Census of Five Sites' Logs
One week of Apache logs from five small sites: which AI crawlers came, how often, whether they read robots.txt, and who fetched llms.txt (none of them).
09/20/2026
Claude Sonnet Medium vs. High Think: Pros & Cons
Compare Claude Sonnet Medium and High thinking modes. Learn differences in reasoning depth, token consumption, quota burn, latency, and ideal use cases.
09/17/2026
Writing an MCP Server That Doesn't Leak
Most MCP guides stop at wiring up a first tool. This is what happens after -- a three-tier permission model, a five-point audit checklist, and a boundary example in code, for a server built in-house or one you're just integrating.
09/17/2026
Quantizing a 70B Model for One Consumer GPU
A 2-bit 70B model fits on one 24GB GPU. Whether it's actually worth running is a different question -- what published quantization research says about that tradeoff, and where it still doesn't settle it.
09/13/2026
Every Check Passed but One
A free browser tool that draws this site's own post covers, and the single quoting bug that got through a build, a gate and a screenshot before anyone actually opened the file it produced.
09/12/2026
A Five-Minute Test That Catches an AI Agent Skipping a Step
An agent that says 'done' may have skipped a step. Make the last step of the task a check that proves the earlier ones happened.
09/12/2026
Catching AI-Hallucinated Package Names Before npm install
LLMs suggest package names that don't exist, and attackers register them. A thirty-second registry check before you install closes the gap.
09/12/2026
Local LLM vs. API: Benchmarking LM Studio for Dev Tasks
Not every dev task needs the flagship model. A quick benchmark against a local LM Studio model shows where the line is, and it isn't where most people assume.
09/12/2026
The AI Page That Should Have Just Said No
An AI-powered admin page looked fully functional right up until it wasn't. The fix was a page honest enough to say 'I can't do this' before the click.
09/12/2026
Trust the Commit Message? Don't.
Three commit messages from AI coding agents said a bug was fixed. Checking the actual code found all three were wrong -- a green report card isn't proof of anything.
09/10/2026
Four ways an AI agent was confidently wrong on a migration
Each of these looked right. A filename match that paired the wrong screenshot with the wrong article, a dev server that made correct code look broken, and a test that wrote down facts it did not own.
09/10/2026
Measure it in a real browser
A simulated 2,061ms render delay that did not exist, an image library silently ignoring the font it was given, and a contrast failure that was a misread value. Three cases for checking directly.
09/07/2026
What the build caught that nobody was looking for
Automated gates on a 150-page migration found a dropped screenshot, thirty redirects pointing at nothing, and an orphan hidden by a regex wildcard. None of it would have been found by reading pages.
09/02/2026
Lighthouse now grades your site for AI agents
Lighthouse has a fifth category, Agentic Browsing, and one of its audits reads your llms.txt. Three sites failed it for the same undocumented reason, and the API will not give you the category unless you ask for it by a name that is not in the docs.
08/17/2025
Tech careers for students, with AI in the room
So many young adults and high-schoolers seem to be disheartened with the rise of AI in tech. Those young minds who LOVE to write code are being dissuaded to even bother studying the art of software development and…