David Coveney

Imagine you knew that the cost of a new car would halve next year? You wouldn't replace yours just yet, would you? You'd wait, unless you were desperate or needed a new car to make real money NOW. This is what's happened in the software development market. People are deferring decisions.

In the early days of UK social media you would be forgiven for thinking the world was rammed with nerds and journalists. And, oddly, bikers. Today I think the most busy are people with time on their hands, writers, procrastinators and people with agendas. The bubbles are considerable.

Now, with adverts and influencers who can speak to core demographics everyone can get exactly what they want online, all of the time. But what you want and what you need are two entirely different things. I suspect AI accelerates that. Isolated people are most at risk.

In the early days of UK social media you would be forgiven for thinking the world was rammed with nerds and journalists. And, oddly, bikers. Today I think the most busy are people with time on their hands, writers, procrastinators and people with agendas. The bubbles are considerable.

Did I really just use a calculator to multiple 7 by 3? Addled here.

Journalist saying AI is bad. Also saying it's wonderful because it saved him a load of money migrating his publication's website. So I checked the site out and every image file is in a folder called ./migration-staging/. The site screams vibe coded if you look at the structures.

But it works. It works well. The problem is that I very much doubt they understand maintenance or backup procedures. There's not a lot wrong in using AI to help you write prose or code. Just don't hand the whole job over. Use AI to speed up an expert, not replace them.

I was curious to see an old client had rebuilt the site we built for them. They've been hyping up how wonderful AI tooling was to do cheap migrations that "cost a fortune" when we did it. I don't know if I should tell them they're serving their production files from a migration bucket.

New branding story I've written for Design Week! We all get those surprise clients that we struggle to align with. www.designweek.co.uk/usas-departm...

Photographed because I don't want the pile-on. This perspective of what's wrong with the country, to blame one person, is as dumb as blaming immigrants. But it's simple and comforting. I remember the Thatcher era well and voted against her when I hit 18. Seemed obvious. However...

So I get grumpy when I see simple blame followed by a bunch of clapping seals. There. Morning rant done with. Happy Monday everyone. You slay!

Photographed because I don't want the pile-on. This perspective of what's wrong with the country, to blame one person, is as dumb as blaming immigrants. But it's simple and comforting. I remember the Thatcher era well and voted against her when I hit 18. Seemed obvious. However...

The reality is that problems are cyclical and symptoms get dealt with whilst nobody deals with the rent-seekers, the grant-takers and the institutional power brokers. They're tougher targets. Clouds not mountains. Yet they affect us hugely.

Photographed because I don't want the pile-on. This perspective of what's wrong with the country, to blame one person, is as dumb as blaming immigrants. But it's simple and comforting. I remember the Thatcher era well and voted against her when I hit 18. Seemed obvious. However...

Has the AIpocalypse arrived? Well, here's a story to make you itch: We've always been good at security and never had a breach that was down to our team. Some fifteen years ago we established a principle that now permeates through all Enterprise WordPress: don't trust PHP!

We're also busy making sure we add more of our own protections at the edge. We realised our bot detection could be ramped up, and so we did what we needed to, patched everything, and watched. So far it's silence at the servers. But that was scary. The power of these new botnets is terrifying.

Has the AIpocalypse arrived? Well, here's a story to make you itch: We've always been good at security and never had a breach that was down to our team. Some fifteen years ago we established a principle that now permeates through all Enterprise WordPress: don't trust PHP!

The good news about this was that we now had a signature to look for. It used a clever trick to make Laravel go into debug mode, then crash it, then get the env variables out, then use keys. It didn't try to do anything except one thing: create new Claude agents.

Has the AIpocalypse arrived? Well, here's a story to make you itch: We've always been good at security and never had a breach that was down to our team. Some fifteen years ago we established a principle that now permeates through all Enterprise WordPress: don't trust PHP!

An agent was probing out services and found a vulnerability in a Laravel library. It was a version or two out of date, but our dependency scanner that alerts us to risks didn't know the library had a problem. To save testing time on lower budget apps you can't be patching on every minor release.

Has the AIpocalypse arrived? Well, here's a story to make you itch: We've always been good at security and never had a breach that was down to our team. Some fifteen years ago we established a principle that now permeates through all Enterprise WordPress: don't trust PHP!

To all intents and purposes the code space was immutable. The browser space somewhat less so, because Javascript. But our alerts went off this week. An AWS key had leaked and someone was trying to use it.

Has the AIpocalypse arrived? Well, here's a story to make you itch: We've always been good at security and never had a breach that was down to our team. Some fifteen years ago we established a principle that now permeates through all Enterprise WordPress: don't trust PHP!