Does Your Website Pass the Grep Test?
I'd never heard of grep and I've been building websites for twenty-seven years. It turns out the simplest operation in computing — searching your own content — is the one most platforms make impossible.
Writing
The LLM Test: Who Does the LLM Think You Are?
I fed the same article to four frontier AI models. Three returned confident summaries — of articles I hadn't written. They didn't misread the content. They didn't know who I was. The insight that survived had vocabulary with no escape route.
The Moment I Stopped Clicking Buttons
I served every client in a single morning, and somewhere around the third one I realised I hadn't opened a browser. The speed wasn't the point — it was what I could see when the walls between my data sources came down.
Content As Code: The Business That Sees Itself
I retrofitted 45 files in one commit — every insight on the site got a standfirst and a pull quote in minutes. That's what happens when your content lives in the same repository as your code.
The Magic Trick: Let Me Pull Back the Curtain
Instructions tell the system what to do. Characters make the wrong thing impossible. Why I stopped writing rules for AI and started installing people instead — and why the obvious candidates all failed.
The Correction Loop
The prompts don't improve. The corrections do. Eight months of catching the system when it drifts — on voice, on meaning, on honesty — is why the output sounds like a specific person wrote it.
Where Principles Come From
A rule without a face is an instruction. An instruction can be ignored. Why naming principles after characters — Joe Gargery, Robert Maxwell, Marco Pierre White — produces something that lasts longer than a policy document.
The CLI Is the Interface
Cursor, Windsurf, Lovable — the debate about which IDE is best misses the point entirely. The interface that matters is the terminal. A Telford web developer on why dashboards are friction cosplaying as security.
The Atomic Commit: Git as Intelligence
I treated commits like save points for years. Moving to atomic commits so Claude Code could read the history changed how I run the business.
The Tier System
I built a 4,978-line context file for Claude Code. It collapsed. Then I built a 500-page wiki. That drowned. Three failures taught me an architecture I couldn't have designed from scratch.