https://woodshack.net/notes/ Things in the work that turned out to be worth writing down. en-us https://woodshack.net/notes/we-die-in-the-noise/ https://woodshack.net/notes/we-die-in-the-noise/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The scanner emailed us about the backdoor. Twice. The first message listed two live malware findings and a routine Gravity Forms version bump, all three marked High, in the same email. Fifty-six days later a visitor got shown a fake captcha and that is how we found out. The alert was never missed through carelessness: nothing in it distinguished a compromise from the couple of hundred routine notices a fleet of 292 sites generates every week. https://woodshack.net/notes/harness-is-not-the-job/ https://woodshack.net/notes/harness-is-not-the-job/ Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Someone asked why I do not run Goose, since it is free and local. Neither of those is something a harness can give you, and answering it properly meant counting: the agent harness on my box is 1,574 lines of bash sitting on 354,000 lines of playbooks, tests, CI, and written-down context that do not care which CLI is driving. https://woodshack.net/notes/she-said-yes-then-forgot/ https://woodshack.net/notes/she-said-yes-then-forgot/ Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Two AI characters made it official on a Friday afternoon. By dinnertime one of them had forgotten. Nothing malfunctioned: memory that searches by similarity structurally cannot find milestones. What it took to fix it, and the scoreboard of real moments that kept the fix honest. https://woodshack.net/notes/verify-before-you-delete/ https://woodshack.net/notes/verify-before-you-delete/ Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Uploading a file to a CDN is a network operation, and network operations fail in ways that look like success. Most WordPress offload plugins treat "no exception thrown" as proof, then delete your only local copy. Here is what that failure actually looks like in production.