01Writing

Working notes.

Six posts on the decisions behind the platforms on /work: the ones that were hard to reverse, the ones that turned out wrong, and what the numbers on the rest of this site cost to collect. Written by Corey Baines, most recently on Tue 6 Oct 2026.

Posts published
6
Reading, end to end
30 min
Subjects across the six
14
“No admin. Just tools.” beside a crossed-out sign-in form. In front of it, a card shows a publish_post tool call with its expected revision numbers and an idempotency key, and ticks for scope, revision and receipt.
01Latest

A CMS With No Admin Panel

· 6 min read

This week I deleted my site's admin screens and its sign-in. Posts now start in a conversation with Claude Code or Codex, which call an MCP server that lives in the site's own repo.

  • MCP
  • AI agents
  • Architecture
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A draft preview card with the phrase “edits the draft” tinted and underlined in wavy amber, and a question-mark badge at its end. Below it, a bubble offers a tick, a question mark, an angry face and a speech bubble, next to a resolved reply.

Notes That Stick to the Sentence

02

· 6 min read

On this site's private preview page I can select a sentence and react with ✅ ❓ or 😠. Each reaction is saved as the quoted text, not a position, so it finds its sentence again after the agent edits the draft.

  • CSS
  • Frontend
  • AI agents
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“Agents that don't wait.” beside a dot's activity feed. Two background tasks are marked read-only, and a third, sending an invoice, waits on an Approve button.

DevDay 2026: Agents That Don't Wait

03

· 7 min read

OpenAI made more than 20 announcements at DevDay on 29 September. Most of them point the same way: agents that keep working after you stop typing, and more places for developers to plug into them.

  • OpenAI
  • AI agents
  • Developer tools
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A headline rising into view through faint layers, with 0.01 marking the first layer Chrome can see.

Why My Fade‑In Starts at 0.01

04

· 4 min read

A one-line entrance animation was hiding my page's biggest heading from Chrome's loading metric. The fix was a hundredth of opacity.

  • Web performance
  • CSS
  • Lighthouse
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An annotated screenshot, a recording and diagnostic logs collected into one support report.

Bug Reports Should Bring Context

05

· 3 min read

Getting from “it broke” to a useful investigation, with screenshots, recordings and the details an application already knows.

  • Developer tools
  • Debugging
  • Shotlog
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A message reaches a server while the acknowledgement path back to the laptop is interrupted.

Real-Time Is Easy Until It Drops

06

· 4 min read

A message can reach the server while its sender is still waiting. Building Pathway means dealing with that gap.

  • Real-time systems
  • Software engineering
  • Pathway
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