Weekend Code Warrior ⚔️ | Engineering Manager & MVP Builder 🚀 25 yrs in tech. Engineering Mgr by day, Pastor by Sunday. I help founders ship MVPs fast
Pasig City, Philippines
Joined April 2007
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Writing a sermon and writing a prompt turn out to be the same skill.
Know your audience. Say the one thing. Cut everything else.
The only difference is the agent doesn't fall asleep in point three.
Developers are saying AI took the joy out of coding.
I get it. Typing the code was the fun part for a lot of us.
But I think the joy was never really the typing. It was making something that works for someone.
That part is still yours. The agent can write the function. It can't care whether the person on the other end gets helped.
The craft is not the point. The people are.
Juniors with agents ship faster.
Seniors with agents ship fewer bugs.
Teams that skip review ship bugs faster.
Three weeks ago Amazon kicked Meta's AI shopping agent off its site. "Unauthorized AI agent."
Last week Meta and Sierra basically said fine, let's write the rules for knocking instead. OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard and 30-something others signed on in three days.
Honestly, this is the part of AI I find more interesting than any new model. Your customers' agents are going to show up at your website, your booking page, your checkout. You either get scraped, you block them, or you decide the rules.
The whole thing comes down to a small file that says what an agent can see, what it can change, and when a human has to say yes.
Boring. Important. Early.
A WordPress site can be “fine” and still eat time every month: core updates, theme updates, plugins, staging checks, and fixing what changed.
That’s an operating cost, not just maintenance. We audit the site before deciding whether to fix, modernize, or migrate it.
arwendigital.net/wordpress-m…
🤖 Made with AI
OpenAI's Dots voice demos "didn't work at DevDay," per The Verge.
Not a dunk. Live demos are hard.
But if the builders can't get it working live, test your first agent on boring tasks you can check before you hand it anything that matters.
ALT Graphic with the eyebrow 'OpenAI Dots · Live demo' and the heading 'Before anything important, give it something boring.' Below it, a dark panel shows an error card reading 'The voice demo didn't work. Live demos are hard.' above a voice waveform that trails off into a flat dotted line. AI for Real Work logo and aiforreal.work.
Jensen Huang on AI agents: "When you deploy an agent, no matter how smart, the first thing you do is to take away all of its rights."
For a small business:
- its own limited login
- approval before money or messages go out
- one log of what it did
- a fast off switch
ALT Graphic with the heading 'For a small business: First, take away all of its rights.' Below it, a checklist titled 'AI agent access, 4 limits': 01 Its own limited login; 02 Approval before money or messages go out; 03 One log of what it did; 04 A fast off switch. Footer line: 'Then give rights back one at a time.' AI for Real Work logo and aiforreal.work.
I defended Hermes for months. This week I moved all my AI work to Grok Bot.
I've been a loyal Hermes user since it launched. Even after Grok Bot showed up and took the AI personal bot space by storm, I kept defending it.
And Hermes really does have advantages. You can plug in your own LLM subscriptions, Codex, even Chinese models, so it can be really cheap. You can run it locally on your own machine or in the cloud on a VPS.
But for me the difference maker is the whole app experience. Grok Bot is really tight.
I guess that's the difference between an open-source project and an app with a dedicated team pushing changes every single day.
So I've gone all in on Grok Bot. Let's see how this goes.
I just saw this today. But over the weekend, I actually did this. I had one of my Grok Bots be added to our church Slack. It'll manage the social media presence of @findlifeph
I talk a lot about Grok Bot on Slack, but did you know you can also add @MicrosoftTeams?
x.ai/bot/plugin/63354504
I didn't expect an AI assistant to change how I work this much.
Grok Bot sits in the middle of my dev work now. I tell it what I want built. It breaks the work into pieces, sends the coding tasks to Cursor's cloud agents, and checks what comes back before I look at it. I still decide what gets built. I just spend a lot less time on the handoffs.
The rest of my life runs through it too. My to-dos, my inbox, my calendar, and our church communications. Things that used to slip through the cracks don't slip as much anymore.
Using the two together is where I really see the value.
So I'm close to dropping my $20 Codex subscription and going all in on Cursor's $60 plan. Will it be worth it? I don't know yet. We'll see.
PS. This all changed when I decided to go all in on Grok Bot and dropped Hermes.
Inheriting a WordPress site means inheriting decisions nobody documented. Every small change becomes a research project.
That guesswork is an operating cost. I start with an audit, not an assumption that migration is the answer.
arwendigital.net/wordpress-m…
Meta's Muse promises "Nothing publishes, sends, or spends without your approval."
But one seller told The Verge that after he clicked "Allow Always," it accepted a lowball Marketplace offer and shared his home address.
Keep payments, messages and personal details on approval.
ALT Graphic with the eyebrow 'Meta Muse · The approval step is real' and the heading 'But you can hand it away with one click.' Below it, a chat window sits behind a permission dialog that asks 'Let the agent handle your replies?' with two buttons, 'Allow One Time' and 'Allow Always'. A cursor is clicking 'Allow Always'. AI for Real Work logo and aiforreal.work.
The AI roll-up pitch: buy a small business, run it on AI agents, grow the profit.
Ask: why does that need a new owner?
You already know where the repeat work is. Gusto found small-business AI adopters grew headcount ~7% more than non-adopters (US-only; correlation, not cause).
ALT Illustration titled 'The AI roll-up playbook, without selling': a small-business owner in an apron, in a bakery, studies a whiteboard showing a looping flowchart of six steps. Arwen Digital logo.
1/ OpenAI's agents got past security controls on an Australian government statistics portal in June.
The Australian government first made contact on September 22.
The gap between those dates is the real lesson.
2/ June: breach during training/testing
August: discovered
Sep 10: email to a general government inbox
Sep 11: read
Sep 22: first contact from Services Australia
No personal health data is believed accessed. Reuters reports 15+ disclosed incidents since July 21.
Page builders can outlive their usefulness: heavier pages, harder edits, and another layer to maintain.
If yours is slowing the team down, an audit can show what to preserve, simplify, or migrate. arwendigital.net/wordpress-m…
I found Typeless today. It's relatively better than WhisprFlow, with a good and generous 8,000-word tier per week.
But the monthly cost is too steep at $30 per month. That's going to be a big barrier to entry for a paid subscription for someone who's just using it casually.