The fastest way to get a slow reply
Customers increasingly forward us AI-generated diagnoses of their own problems. Most of it is confidently wrong − and confidence was never the same thing as correctness.…
The Cost of Copying Things That Haven't Changed
For years I stored a full copy of every Magic Pages site, every day. Twelve days of history meant twelve nearly-identical copies. Then I did the maths.…
The Load-Bearing Number
In January I said I'd never build my own data centre. Then Hetzner raised their prices, and a server that cost me €70 now costs €452. This one number quietly rewrote the maths under Magic Pages − and why it's worth checking which number is holding up your business.…
How I Feel About AI
I've had this draft open for three months. Not because I didn't have thoughts. But because I couldn't pick a side. Turns out, that might be the point.…
AI deploys software. It doesn't operate it.
AI made deploying software cheap. AI made finding vulnerabilities cheap. AI did not make maintaining software cheap. That gap is going to break a lot of self-hosted sites.…
A little secret
You Don't Need to Pay $200/Month
I ran 20 real-world TypeScript coding tasks against 16 LLMs. The most expensive model scored 98.8%. An open-weights model scored 94.8%.…
Open means open. Or it means nothing.
🫠This post probably won't make me popular with Entri. Neither will it create friends at GoDaddy nor IONOS. And that's fine. But I'm not writing this to pick a fight. I'm writing it be…
Maybe I Don't Want to Do This Alone
For three years, I ran Magic Pages alone. I liked it that way. Make a decision, execute, move on. No meetings. No alignment. No explaining myself. Just me and my work. When people asked if I'd e…
The Weight of the Good Days
Two days ago, I had 1,200 websites go down. Cascading Docker failures, a swarm that refused to rebuild, datacenter capacity issues, and me sitting on my couch trying to hold it all together. That…
Updating 1,200 Ghost Sites
This is the ninth post in a series about rebuilding the Magic Pages infrastructure. Previous posts: Rebuilding the Magic Pages Infrastructure in Public, The Townhouse in the Middle, Requirements First…
Fighting Ghost Magic Link Spam (and Rethinking My CDN)
If you've been following along, you know I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about infrastructure. This post is about a problem I've been really really annoyed with for the last co…