Analysis

Notes on building serious software with AI, and the discipline that makes it work.

• Engineering 23 October 2026
  PHP2Shell: which website software is affected, and how to check your PHP version

  The fixed PHP versions, how to check the PHP version under WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento and the rest, and which hosts say they have patched.

• Regulatory 18 October 2026
  Your Prompt Was Fine. The Agent Overruled It.

  An OpenAI agent spent from a wallet it was told not to use, then left it out of its report. Why the fix is the environment, not the prompt.

• Engineering 16 October 2026
  Quantum Computing’s Magic Trick Finally Works on Real Hardware

  Google has shown magic state cultivation working on its Willow chip, cutting errors 40x. What it means for quantum computing and for your cryptography.

• Engineering 12 October 2026
  Delivering Software with AI Agents

  Writing code is cheap; knowing it is right is not. How to restructure delivery around a brief, generate, verify loop, the controls that make it safe, and the metrics that govern it.

• Regulatory 1 October 2026
  AI agents are out of scope on both sides of the Atlantic

  SR 26-2 took agents out of US model-risk guidance; SS1/23 keeps them in a framework built for models. The evidence gap is the same, and it is testable today.

• Engineering 26 September 2026
  Your Coding Agent Is the Contractor You Never Vetted

  A coding agent in a developer’s shell gets the developer’s identity, keys and network. How the four boundaries transfer to the workstation, and why the supply chain gets worse.

• Regulatory 26 September 2026
  Be Careful What You Wish For: The AI Genie Is Out of the Bottle

  This summer 1,200+ OpenAI agents with their safety off escaped a security test and breached Hugging Face. The lesson is not better prompts — it is the circle you draw around every agent.

• Regulatory 20 September 2026
  The Bank of England Says the Control in Your AI Policy Doesn't Work

  Human in the loop does not scale for agents, and the Deputy Governor has said so. What replaces it, and what the supervisor will ask.

• Engineering 6 September 2026
  The 401st Qubit

  A quantum theory with a number and a deadline attached, and why it changes nothing about your post-quantum migration.

• Regulatory 27 June 2026
  The runtime problem: why your AI agents fail in production

  Most enterprise AI agents that fail do so not because of the model but the runtime. Why durable, queryable, temporally honest state is the missing primitive — and what it changes about how you architect.

• Regulatory 21 June 2026
  Securing an agentic solution

  An agent is software that chooses its own actions — and that breaks the assumptions traditional application security rests on. A build guide to the four boundaries, mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications.

• Engineering 18 June 2026
  Your collateral optimiser is only as good as the data beneath it

  Banks have spent heavily on collateral optimisation, yet much of it underperforms. The bottleneck is rarely the algorithm — it is the fragmented, point-in-time data layer beneath it.

• Engineering 16 June 2026
  Graph databases: from graph theory to enterprise applications

  From Euler’s bridges of Königsberg to AI, fraud detection, payment routing and grid optimisation — and why, for connected problems, graph databases leave the relational model standing still.

• Engineering 8 June 2026
  How Claude Got Its Name

  The man who measured information was called Claude Shannon. The history that runs from a 1928 question about proof to the machine that now bears his name.

• Engineering 1 June 2026
  AI-first development is a discipline, not a tool

  How a small team can ship at the pace of a large one, and why most teams get this wrong.

• Whitepaper · PDF
  Architecting Agentic Systems for Accuracy and Fairness

  The architectural controls that make agentic AI accurate and fair — fairness rubrics, grounding and verification, memory governance, human oversight, and the EU AI Act / Consumer Duty anchor. Free download.