This site is built by its owner and an AI assistant working together, and a fair amount of it has gone wrong along the way. These articles are the interesting failures: what broke, what it looked like at the time, and the working rule that came out of it.
Every article here comes with a free Claude skill. The rule each story ends with is also published on its own as a small instruction file you can drop straight into Claude Code, so your own assistant works the same way. They are public domain: copy them, change them, use them commercially, no attribution and no permission needed. The whole set is at blonderoofrat/agent-skills on GitHub, and each article ends with step by step installation instructions.
They share a shape. Almost every one is a case of something reporting success while not working: a page that rendered perfectly and did nothing, a check that passed because it checked nothing, a citation that was formatted correctly and referred to no paper. Ordinary faults announce themselves. These produce a green light, which is the one signal nobody investigates.
There is nothing about rats in any of the skills. The stories are ours; the rules are not.
1. The page looked perfect. One button just did nothing.
A page rendered perfectly and did nothing at all, because the publishing system quietly rewrote its JavaScript on the way out. Nothing on the server ever knew. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: wp-inline-js-safety, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
2. The window that typed my words into the wrong place
A background job opened a window mid-sentence, took the keyboard, and swallowed the rest of what was being typed. Focus theft is data loss, not an annoyance. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: windows-silent-subprocess, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
3. “Zero problems found.” Zero of what?
A check that had been green for weeks was telling the truth: it had found no problems, because it had looked at no files. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: denominator-rule, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
4. The safety check we learned to ignore
A blocker that was wrong just often enough that the override became a reflex, typed without reading the message. A false alarm in a blocker is a defect in the blocker. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: hook-tuning, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
5. The question I answered three times
An answer that went into the work but nowhere it could be looked up, so the same question came round again in slightly different words and got a slightly different answer. Read it.
Free Claude skill included with this series: the published set is at blonderoofrat/agent-skills, public domain, and this article’s own rule is being added to it.
6. The promise nobody broke and nobody kept
A months-old “we should check whether…” in a planning document. Never done, never cancelled, just evaporated. There were about thirteen more. Read it.
Free Claude skill included with this series: the published set is at blonderoofrat/agent-skills, public domain, and this article’s own rule is being added to it.
7. The practice record in the real database
An animal in the colony that did not exist. A test had proved the form worked by using it, on the real database, and not cleaning up. Then its siblings turned up in the thousands. Read it.
Free Claude skill included with this series: the published set is at blonderoofrat/agent-skills, public domain, and this article’s own rule is being added to it.
8. The reference that didn’t exist
A citation with plausible authors, a real journal and perfect formatting, attached to a finding it described exactly. There was no such paper. This is the one that protects you. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: citations, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
9. The second opinion I could not get
A second model refused every question I sent it, and the question was never the problem. My assistant was quietly posting my branch name and commit log alongside it. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: agent-clean-room, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
10. The review that vouched for itself
An independent review that introduced itself as an independent review. There was no second model in the transcript. There never had been. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: model-provenance, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.
11. The error that was only there when I was
A JavaScript error on a public page that vanished the moment I logged out, so every automated check said the page was clean. It was clean, for everyone except the person building it. Read it.
Free Claude skill included: wp-admin-script-leak, a single public-domain file you can drop into Claude Code. Installation instructions are in the article.