Dependabot minimum release age and auto-merge — the trap in a private repo
On a private repo the dependency graph is off by default, so Dependabot opened no npm pull request, and the auto-merge workflow merged 45s before CI finished.
Latest posts
Astro article badges from Vercel Web Analytics — resolved in the build, shipped as static HTML
How this Astro blog badges its most-read articles: one Vercel Web Analytics query during the build, summed across three locales, baked into static HTML.
CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR let me move my glossary out of a Claude Code skill — and stop approving every write
Claude Code treats .claude/ as a protected path, so allow rules cannot pre-approve writes there. Moving a mutable glossary out with CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR.
How do Chrome DevTools MCP and Playwright MCP differ, and why I chose Chrome DevTools for my Astro blog
Chrome DevTools MCP and Playwright MCP expose different surfaces to a coding agent. What each gives you, and why an Astro blog kept one and denied the other.
A static Astro blog that counts likes — one Vercel route and Upstash Redis
Adding a shared like counter to a fully static Astro site: one non-prerendered route, Upstash Redis key design, and the CI bugs that verifying it cost.
How I made Japanese search work by intercepting Pagefind's Enter key in the capture phase
Pagefind navigated away while an IME conversion was open. isComposing is necessary but not sufficient: WebKit fires compositionend before the keydown.
How I made Astro figures size themselves and enlarge on tap — intrinsic width, a native dialog, and @2x
Why width:100% blurred a 256px screenshot in Astro, and how a native dialog made every diagram readable on a phone. Seven measurements corrected the design.
Pagefind's stemming warning was a red herring — Japanese search broke on segmentation
Pagefind warned about missing stemming for Japanese and Chinese on every build. The real defect was a query and index tokenizer mismatch returning wrong pages.
git gc recovered 8.6 MB while I was investigating a 0.8 MB problem in git history
Chasing 1.6 MB of PNG blobs in git history found a repo that had never been packed. git gc recovered 8.6 MB; the rewrite I skipped was worth 0.8 MB.
Astro share buttons that pick their targets by language — a sticky rail on desktop, pills on mobile
Share buttons in Astro built from intent URLs: a different target set per locale, a sticky icon rail on wide screens, and the endpoint drift found on the way.
Playwright as a measuring instrument — the i18n defect no static check can reach
Measuring translated SVG labels against their boxes with Playwright, and the two bugs that made the check report 37 pages clean while measuring nothing.
An Astro table of contents that keeps your place — scroll-spy, a shared rail, and dvh on mobile
Follow-the-reader scrolling, a shared rail, and the ::details-content box that silently ate a mobile max-height in an Astro table of contents.
Expressive Code in an Astro blog — filename tabs, file icons, and 97 unreadable fences
Adopting Expressive Code in Astro 7: filename tabs, per-theme file icons, a Sätteri processor trap, and 97 fences Shiki was reading as a language name.
How a chain of failures produced the LLM (part 2) — from attention to the scaling revolution and alignment
From context to the finished LLM: the limits of RNNs, the birth of attention, the Transformer, GPT-3 scaling, RLHF alignment, and the era of efficiency.
How a chain of failures produced the LLM (part 1) — from the limits of maths to the geometry of meaning
The LLM as a by-product of unrelated problems: Turing on computability, Shannon on information, the perceptron, backpropagation, GPUs, and Word2Vec.
RAG vs fine-tuning for KB search — what fine-tuning actually learns, and when pure IR wins
Whether fine-tuning can replace RAG for knowledge base search: what fine-tuning actually learns, when pure IR or long context wins, and what each costs.
The HTTP QUERY method (RFC 10008) implemented in Python — how it differs from GET and POST
Implementing RFC 10008 HTTP QUERY in Python with Starlette: safe, idempotent, cacheable requests with a structured body, and how it complements GraphQL.
Deterministic AI agent tests with AIMock — mocking LLMs, vector DBs, MCP, and A2A on one port
AIMock mocks the whole AI stack on one port (LLM, vector DB, MCP, A2A), so an agent test suite runs in under three seconds with identical output every time.
Five rounds to a blog logo with an AI agent — the /logo skill and three scripts they left behind
Redesigning this blog's logo and code font with an AI agent: a broken SVG letterform, a regex bounding box, a wrong kanji, and the /logo skill it produced.
Autoregressive vs diffusion image generation — how gpt-image-1 and DALL-E 3 differ
Why gpt-image-1 and DALL-E 3 differ: autoregressive tokens vs iterative denoising, the discrete-vs-continuous wall, DiT, and the three-way 2026 market.
A 2 MB PNG became 316 KB WebP — but only before the first commit
Measuring PNG, JPEG and WebP for article figures, why re-compressing the PNG made it larger, and why converting an image git already tracks reclaims nothing.
Astro content collections instead of a CMS — MDX over Markdown, and where the foreign keys went
Why this trilingual Astro blog has no CMS: the directory layout images forced, MDX over Markdown, and a tag registry standing in for foreign keys.
A2A vs MCP — why agent-to-agent needs its own protocol, and why both chose HTTP over gRPC
Why MCP alone is not enough for agent-to-agent communication: peer equality, Agent Card discovery, async task state, and why both protocols chose HTTP.