Writing

Notes on evals, retrieval, and context engineering, alongside the WordPress engineering work that came before them.

September 9, 2026

My AI memory kept a stale diagnosis alive

My weekly planning task stopped producing files. AI summaries kept calling it a failure, even though the records also said it was disabled. What that taught me about dates, evidence, and agent memory.

ai applied-ai context-engineering agents knowledge-engineering

September 2, 2026

A half-finished review looks exactly like a passing one

My agent pipeline reviews its own code before it pushes. A reviewer killed halfway through left a file on disk that the next run read as approval, and only a rebase conflict stopped unreviewed code reaching a pull request.

ai applied-ai agents reliability evals

August 25, 2026

95% at launch, 65% a month later

Anthropic published the accuracy curve for hand-written knowledge feeding an AI agent: 21% without it, 95% with it, 65% a month later with nobody editing anything. The third number is the one I have to plan for.

ai applied-ai knowledge-engineering rag evals

August 4, 2026

A skill told me about a flag that didn't exist

One wrong line in an instruction file cost time across three pull requests before anyone traced it. A wrong fact in code fails once, loudly. A wrong fact in an instruction file fails quietly, in every session, forever.

ai agentic-workflows claude-code context-engineering tooling

August 2, 2026

Five plugins, five missing operator paths

Every plugin I've published exists because a feature shipped without a way for the person running the site to operate it. Support absorbs that cost monthly, and it never shows up as anything anyone has to fix.

wordpress plugin-development support-engineering memberpress members

July 29, 2026

Instructions are not a permission boundary

I went looking for the safety rules in my AI setup and found that every one of them was a polite request. Here's what turns a rule into a control, and the incident at Anthropic that made me check.

ai applied-ai agents security context-engineering

July 25, 2026

The memory system behind my AI workflow

LLM sessions start cold every time. Here's the file-based memory system I built so an AI agent picks up where the last session left off, without me re-explaining my life each morning.

ai applied-ai context-engineering agents knowledge-engineering productivity

July 23, 2026

Three cheap eval runs beat one flagship pass

A 13-model benchmark on 26 known CVEs shows run-to-run variance matters more than model tier. The lever in applied AI is the eval harness, not the model budget.

ai applied-ai evals benchmarks llm cost

July 17, 2026

From support tickets to evals: a support engineer's path into applied AI

Years of Tier 3 support escalations taught me to tell a plausible answer from a correct one. That single skill turns out to be most of the job in applied AI: evals, RAG grounding, and knowledge curation.

ai applied-ai evals rag knowledge-engineering career support-engineering

May 13, 2026

Why MemberPress Needs a Staging Safe Mode

A WordPress plugin that makes MemberPress safe to run on staging — blocks customer-facing mail, pauses reminder crons, sandboxes payment gateways at read time, and survives the clone.

wordpress plugin-development memberpress open-source staging devops

May 11, 2026

How I Built Admin Filters for MemberPress

A WordPress.org plugin that adds address, custom-field, and user-meta filters to MemberPress admin lists — built entirely on hooks, with no core files modified.

wordpress plugin-development memberpress open-source admin-ux

May 8, 2026

How I Built Selective Role Reset for the Members Plugin

The Members plugin can now restore WordPress roles to a clean state — without nuking custom roles created by other plugins, and without orphaning users. Here's the problem and how I solved it.

wordpress plugin-development members open-source access-control

April 29, 2026

How I Built the Administrator Rescue Link for the Members Plugin

The Members plugin now ships with a magic link that lets locked-out administrators restore their own access — without touching the database. Here's the problem it solves, how I built it, and how to use it.

wordpress plugin-development members open-source access-control

April 15, 2026

Controlling the Past: Building Forward-Only Access for MemberPress

How the MemberPress Forward-Only Access plugin gates content by publish date vs. join date — with configurable rules, exclusions, wp-config overrides, and hooks for developers.

wordpress plugin-development memberpress access-control

April 2, 2026

How to Bulk Generate PDF Invoices in MemberPress

A step-by-step tutorial for using the PDF Invoice Generator plugin to create invoices in bulk for MemberPress transactions — by date range, status, or all at once.

memberpress invoices pdf wordpress plugin tutorial

March 31, 2026

How to Troubleshoot Failed Subscription Renewals in MemberPress

A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing failed subscription renewals in MemberPress — covering webhook issues, gateway mismatches, and the silent failures that cost you recurring revenue.

memberpress subscriptions troubleshooting stripe paypal wordpress

March 27, 2026

How to Track and Manage Gift Memberships in MemberPress

Learn how to track gifted memberships, follow up on unclaimed gifts, export gift data, and automate reminders in MemberPress — with practical workflows and tools.

memberpress gifting membership management wordpress gift memberships

February 25, 2026

Bridging the Reporting Gap: The Engineering Behind the MemberPress Gift Reporter

How I built a scalable solution to automate gift transaction insights for high-traffic membership sites.

wordpress plugin-development data-analytics memberpress

February 24, 2026

Debugging at Scale: Lessons from Tier 3 Support

Insights from a Tier 3 Engineer on maintaining stability in high-traffic WordPress and SaaS environments.

wordpress php debugging saas

February 23, 2026

Welcome to My Technical Blog

Introducing a space for deep-dive case studies, WordPress engineering insights, and lessons from support escalations, the hardest of them handled at Tier 3.

announcement wordpress engineering