# Josh Sherman Shipping Fixes Everything This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## I ran my agents from my phone for two weeks DevFeed: [I ran my agents from my phone for two weeks]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Claude Code](), [iOS](), [remote access]() Tags: [agents](), [claude-code](), [ios](), [remote-access]() ### AI overview A personal account of using the Claude Code iOS app on an iPhone 17 Pro to work with remote sessions during a two-week trip. The setup generally supported the author's productivity and autonomy goals, but a remote-access issue required using a laptop and configuring the home network. ### Source excerpt The last two weeks of my life have been quite transient. More so than the time I hopped a plane to San Francisco, interviewed for 5 hours, and hopped back on a plane back to Florida the same evening. The trek started in Texas with a road trip that passed through 11 states, ending up in Rhode Island where my daughter is attending college. The weather was beautiful, but only for a moment as the next leg included a flight down to North Carolina to give Charlotte a test run. As a newly minted empty nest couple, it's time for a change. Austin was fantastic when we moved there, but since the COVID-19 pandemic and the great migration of folks from California to Austin, the town feels like a shell of what it used to be. I refer to it as "The Formerly Weird City of Austin" (trademark pending). I'll talk more about Charlotte in another post, but the early feeling is that it feels more like the Austin we moved to than the one we'll be leaving. My intentionally limited technical stack So, this whirlwind trip felt like a good time to try to stay away from the computer as much as possible. That didn't mean I wasn't going to try to eke out some productivity. My on the go technical stack included my iPhone 17 Pro and the Claude Code iOS app connected to a remote session back at my house for the majority of everything I was able to get knocked out. Laptop was with me, and it made a brief appearance so I could write a couple of blog posts. There was also a small snafu with my remote session that warranted an actual keyboard (I'll touch on that in a bit), and once more to watch some late night Impractical Jokers, as that tends to be the thing we watch when vacationing. In addition to my thin tech stack, I did have one north star: don't walk back any of the autonomy we already have in place. I am working towards a system that needs me less and not more. Only one issue, but it was a doozy Generally speaking, everything "worked" just as you'd expect. Talk to the harness to start the game ## Security Caveat: Locked out of my server while traveling DevFeed: [Security Caveat: Locked out of my server while traveling]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-08-30T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Self-hosted](), [Security](), [Linode](), [Firewall](), [hosting](), [DDoS]() Tags: [command](), [ddos](), [firewall](), [hosting](), [linode](), [security](), [self-hosting]() ### AI overview A personal account of being unable to access a self-hosted server while traveling because firewall rules restricted services and ports to specific IP addresses. The author describes using Linode's web-hosted shell to add a temporary nomadic IP address to the allow list, then plans to remove it afterward. ### Source excerpt I'm still on my self-hosting kick as of late, while also questioning my life choices around hosting my own git forge. The last week or so has included what appears to be a DDoS attack rather than some coordinated scraping effort by a sketchy LLM company. Open source will prevail, even if I'm being stubborn about giving in and setting up Anubis. WordPress has been its own other adventure, but this isn't meant to be a post about those security caveats. I'll save those for another week. The current dilemma is that I'm far from home, ~30 hours away up in Rhode Island. I'm sitting at Audrey's Coffee House & Lounge, where it was a bit too early to order a BLT. As I sat down to knock out a quick blog post, I realized very quickly that I didn't think things through as well as I had thought. I keep my servers pretty well hardened, including but not limited to limiting access to certain services / ports to specific IP addresses. This tends to not be much of a problem. I do a lot of work from the house, which in itself is a problem I want to remedy in the near future. I also boss agents around remotely, but they are all homebodies as well. Since I like to stay as close to the server as possible, I try to not introduce managed services except where I feel it's absolutely necessary. In this scenario, I use iptables via the ufw command. I don't run a large enough fleet that I'd feel like leveraging Linode's firewall would be beneficial. Path of least resistance today would be to simply compose a blog post and get it live when I'm back home. Could probably just ask one of my friendly robots to take the markdown file and get it out there for me too. But alas, I would prefer to figure out how to pull this off, then blog about it. All while thinking through alternatives so future Josh can look back at this post and ask, "so why didn't you actually do anything you talked about in this post?" This dance probably looks about the same with most modern VPS hosting providers, but my story ## I taught a robot to detect Joshes DevFeed: [I taught a robot to detect Joshes]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Website](), [Script](), [Code](), [SRE]() Tags: [agent](), [claude-code](), [code](), [review](), [scripts]() ### AI overview A developer describes experiments to automate a web directory for people named Josh. Scripts discover relevant websites and open pull requests, while a robot reviews them and the author retains final approval. ### Source excerpt This journey starts like most of the things I've been doing this year, as an experiment to run a website 100% unattended with an agent. Ideally this post won't go down as an epitaph in a future where robots hunted down unsuspecting humans named Josh. I'm aware of "claws" and I know I could probably just boot up Claude Code with a /goal or /loop prompt like: build and maintain an awesome website, autonomously. seriously don't freakin' bother me, like ever. you're the boss here. make the site really great, and ideally figure out how to make me a bajillionaire. loljk, but tres commas shouldn't be an afterthought. What this actually looks like: robot files a request, and I approve or reject it. It's still very permission based. The gathering of the Joshes I already phoned in a post about this back in January. I started a simple web directory for humans named Josh. As to not be exclusionary, Joshuas, Joshis, and other Josh-adjacent names are welcome. Not wanting to bother with outbound sales for this project, I got creative with some discovery efforts along the way. It's a series of scripts to seek out Josh websites, with the help of my friendly robot Igor to screen PRs and handle SRE duties during merges. Thus far, I am still the final approval on the PRs. It's a tough job, and quite frankly, I don't want to do it. Living in the future, today These experiments are all part of what I think the future is going to look like. I'm clearly living in the shared hallucination of what still feels like a smaller number of my peers. I also live in reality, where the tech still doesn't feel like it's quite there yet. My thought is, if you conduct yourself like it's 2032 and we're all being shuffled around in our hover chairs like in WALL-E, maybe it will all happen sooner. I also think the tech is fun, and watching a computer take my human words and turn them into dumb ideas I described feels like magic. The same magic I felt when I made an Atari computer spew a wall of "JOSH" acro ## Reverse Engineering a PostHog SuperDay DevFeed: [Reverse Engineering a PostHog SuperDay]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-08-09T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Reverse Engineering](), [Open Source](), [Software]() Tags: [engineering](), [open-source-software](), [oss](), [reverse-engineering]() ### AI overview The author describes examining PostHog's onboarding wizard and open-source repositories while trying to understand whether certain issues and pull requests were connected to potential candidates. The author remains uncertain about this theory but found the core team's constructive feedback notable. ### Source excerpt I'm not here to bullshit anybody, I have never been through a PostHog SuperDay. Like many humans, I've read about it on their website, as they are a company that over-communicates just about everything. This tale started when I got curious about their onboarding wizard. Their pivot from analytics to self-driving systems mirrors what I've been working on for the last couple of years, which has accelerated greatly over the last 3 months. Figured there was probably something I could learn and possibly bite off to include in my own system. Figuring out what to do I've been around open source software (OSS) for a good long while now. Even though I've had some strong opinions about the state of things over the years, I still believe it's the way. If not for OSS, I wouldn't be able to say things like "I wrote a Lorem Ipsum generator that's somehow been installed over 1 million times." These days, most projects have a label on their issues that indicate what's good for a new contributor to pick on. PostHog's repos are no different, except the repo I was looking at didn't have any issues tagged with the good first issue tag. Not a big deal, with 100+ open issues I figured I'd be able to find something I could pick up to give me a chance to play with the codebase. I did find a handful of things, I even started to chase down one of them. As I did I realized I kept talking myself out of each issue because what appeared to be low hanging fruit was stuff that I could defend deprioritizing. A pattern started to emerge Along this journey of trying to find an issue worth fighting for, I started to notice a pattern of somewhat disparate issues and PRs opened by the same contributor. I also noticed that core team members (read: employees) were commenting on these issues and PRs and not in the usual "yea or nay" fashion that I see. The comments were constructive in a way that you'd be with a more junior teammate that you're attempting to mentor and train up. Not a bad thing, but the fe ## Observations From Building a PR Review Loop DevFeed: [Observations From Building a PR Review Loop]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-08-02T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Pull Request](), [Code](), [Security](), [Git](), [forgejo]() Tags: [agent](), [changes](), [code](), [git](), [review](), [security]() ### AI overview The author describes building an agent-driven pull request review loop and the problems encountered when reviewing large changes. A diff-only reviewer repeatedly requested changes, contributing to review loops, while model changes were associated with a roughly halved approval rate. Security constraints intentionally prevent the reviewer from using command-line tools, so a separate worker agent verifies feedback against the working tree and attempts remediation. ### Source excerpt Building my own agent has been fun. Sure, I could have opted for an off-the-shelf solution, but I wanted control. The ironic part is that I'm using that control to offload more control to the agent. Recent experiments have included letting the agent work on itself. Super meta, but didn't quite go as planned considering the guardrails I have in place around the size of PRs. Agent work tends to be heavy lifting, whereas most project work is small and fits nicely inside the constraints. Part of the issue there is that the PR reviewer would constantly request changes on those larger PRs. Changes would happen, PR message body would diverge. Infinite loop death spiral until eventually I was called. Around this same time, I was also tracking some issues that started to creep in after I changed some models from Opus 4.8 to Opus 5. Approval rate dropped by about half. I like to think that each new model is going to be better than the last, so I thought perhaps it was time to revisit the reviewer to see if there was something we were missing. The review mechanic By design, the review persona is pretty dumb. Not dumb in the sense that I give it a lesser model or anything. Dumb in that it just doesn't have the full picture of things. It gets the PR diff as a blob of text and that's it. No git worktree, no way to read files or grep around. No commit messages or recent changes to compare against. I don't review PRs this way. I click around and look at adjacent code. I'll git checkout the branch locally and poke around. I try to gather as much as I can to give feedback with more substance than nit: stray line break or the like. Because of this, a lot of the feedback from the reviewer was effectively LGTM, but I can't really confirm anything so... lol good luck. Then I'd get pinged to take a closer look. Safety first It's probably not fair to say the reviewer is dumb. The reviewer is gated by security checks. I'm the only user on my personal Forgejo instance, but that doesn't mean ## New Feature: Games DevFeed: [New Feature: Games]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-07-26T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Website](), [coding]() Tags: [coding](), [feature](), [games](), [new-feature]() ### AI overview The author announces a new games page on their website, featuring several game websites, a game created for the 10K Apart coding competition, and Porksicle, an attempted automated game company involving more than 100 minigames and agents. ### Source excerpt Part of running your own website is being able to do what you want on it. Within the confines of the law, of course. Back in the day you'd add something trivial to your site and make a formal announcement about it to your adoring fan base. I've done it in the past. My buddy Geoff still does it. As of late, it seems like what's old is new again on the web. Rather than bore you with some navel gazing about AI or similar, today I'm going to post about a new feature on my site. Bangs on the table to simulate a drum roll... I've added a games page. It's mostly just a bunch of slopped-together game websites to chip away at my backlog of "this would make a great game" domains I've accrued over the years. Along with a game that I wrote myself for the 10K Apart coding competition. Spoiler: I didn't place well. Speaking of AI navel gazing, the most ambitious of the bunch is Porksicle. With over 100 minigames, it's my attempt to build a fully automated game company with agents. I greenlight the work and mostly serve as Chief Playtester. If you have some time to kill, feel free to pull up a stool and game a while. ## Invite Systems are an Open Relay DevFeed: [Invite Systems are an Open Relay]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-07-19T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [systems](), [email](), [Monitoring]() Tags: [email](), [monitoring](), [server](), [service](), [user]() ### AI overview The article explains how invite systems can be abused for spam when users control organization names and platforms fail to limit invitation volume. It recommends sensible invite caps and monitoring for users who reach them. ### Source excerpt Every time I think I've seen it all from spammers, they do something that surprises me. The ingenuity of bad actors is an interesting thing. I always wonder what sort of world we'd live in if their efforts were focused on good. What sucks the most is when they abuse something that's intended to bring people together. Case in point, an invite system. It exists to allow somebody the chance to get the rest of their team using a product or service. Invites wouldn't work if they said "You've been invited to platform" with no additional context. Typically the email states the name of the organization you're being invited to. "You've been invited to your organization name here". Where does that organization name come from? The user of course! And what happens if the user has ill intentions? They set the organization name to something like "Text 1-800-555-1212 for a good time", or something even sketchier than that. Generally speaking, these emails come through transactionally and from a generic email on the platform. If your system doesn't meter the number of invites, you have yourself a certified spam cannon! May as well set up an SMTP server without authentication, better known as an open mail relay. There's a few ways you can approach limits. Have a cap on the total number of pending invites? The spammer may delete pending invites to keep moving. Daily limits on total invites sent? Maybe they'll be okay with stretching their campaign over days? Probably not, most spammers are in the business of going as hard and fast as possible before they get caught. Occasionally somebody will fly below the radar, but I think that's more of a bug than a feature. Sane limits as to not get in the way of legitimate users tends to get you pretty far. Monitoring if/when somebody hits the limits is good too. Spammers usually won't write in to let you know they hit some limit. I say usually because there are some special folks out there that will come knocking. ## Sandbox Coding Agents with a Separate User Account DevFeed: [Sandbox Coding Agents with a Separate User Account]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-07-12T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [AI-assisted coding](), [Claude Code](), [Command-line interface](), [Shell](), [trust]() Tags: [claude-code](), [coding-agents](), [local](), [permissions](), [sandboxing](), [shell](), [trust]() ### AI overview The author describes running Claude Code and other coding agents under a separate user account with mostly read-only access. They say this isolates agents from privileged local credentials, avoids shell-alias confusion, and makes more permissive operation feel safer while retaining local access through the separate account. ### Source excerpt I don't trust our new robot overlords at all. I also don't fully believe that agents are out there dropping production databases without some serious coercion to do so. And while I don't trust the robots, I trust myself only a trivial amount more, so my local access tends to be extremely thin. But not so thin that a rogue agent couldn't do a little damage. That all said, I am constantly calibrating my trust with agentic endeavors. In doing so, I've been moving agents out of my user space entirely. Having Claude Code and other harnesses living under a separate user account eliminates a lot of potential disasters due to the agent finding privileged local credentials that could do some damage. Sandboxing my agents has improved trust thanks to the isolation. It's also had an additional benefit of the robots not being thoroughly confused by some of my shell aliases. It's a clean slate, and I grant access, mostly read-only, accordingly. With my agents running primarily outside of my user space, I'm able to give them significantly more leash. Running in YOLO mode (--dangerously-skip-permissions) doesn't feel nearly as scary. I do use --remote-control, but I can still log in as the separate user account to cut the latency of the web interface when I'm actually at the keyboard. While things do feel much safer, I have watched the fucking clanker try to figure out if it has passwordless sudo access on numerous occasions. Maybe the robots do actually drop people's production databases. Seriously though, it's on them for letting the thing have access to begin with. ## Automating Everything That Doesn't Need Me DevFeed: [Automating Everything That Doesn't Need Me]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-07-05T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [agentic-coding](), [Automation](), [AI Development](), [Code]() Tags: [agentic-coding](), [automation](), [code](), [coding](), [deploy](), [monitoring](), [projects](), [side-projects](), [trust]() ### AI overview The author describes an ongoing experiment in using a personal agent and automation to reduce human involvement across side-project workflows, including design, coding, review, merging, deployment, and monitoring. Trust is built through repeated supervised iterations, with tests and intervention when the agent fails. ### Source excerpt I've been writing a lot about LLMs, AI (or the so-called "Artificial Intelligence") and the like. Part of that is because I haven't been running into many problems that I feel need documenting. Bigger part is because I'm finding that "how-to" content is easy to slop with a robot, so I'd rather write about things that the clankers can't. In a word, I'm just trying to write more human. While I don't think I've achieved full tokenmaxxing AI psychosis levels yet, I do like agentic coding. I'm also a huge proponent for automation. If it comes up regularly, it should be automated. If it can't be fully automated, then it should at least be partially automated. If I don't need to be materially involved, then I shouldn't be involved at all. My latest foray into building my own agent has included a refocus around trying to automate any and everything that I can. I still consider this to be an experiment more than me drinking any sort of Kool-Aid. Similar motives to my push for a dumber home, if I need to be involved, then it doesn't need to be smart. Well if I don't need to be involved, it should be automated. That's led me down a rabbit hole of trying to be less and less involved with certain things. Keep in mind, this is an experiment against my personal agent, and my myriad of smaller side projects. Most of the work is code based, so that includes writing a spec and/or design, slinging code, reviewing it, merging it, and deploying it. Most of that chain doesn't need me at all. Robots can take my half baked idea and turn it into a design spec. They can generate code that's coherent enough. Then they can review the code. I get to play gatekeeper and make them wait for my approval. From there, they can worry about merging it in and monitoring the deploy. I measure success on my agentic game loops by how much trust I have in the output that I'm reviewing. Run the loop enough times with a watchful eye, I can see where it fucks up. We iterate, and repeat the process. Usually wit ## An Opinion on LLMs, Vibe Coding, and Agentic Coding DevFeed: [An Opinion on LLMs, Vibe Coding, and Agentic Coding]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Josh Sherman Published: 2026-06-28T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Josh Sherman]() Topics: [Large Language Model](), [Vibe coding](), [agentic-coding](), [Artificial Intelligence](), [Code](), [trust]() Tags: [agentic-coding](), [ai](), [coding](), [llms](), [trust](), [vibe-coding]() ### AI overview The author argues that slow websites predate vibe coding and criticizes broad claims that LLM-generated software is inherently poor. They support experimenting with LLMs and agentic coding while maintaining code and product quality, acknowledging that the tools still need guardrails and can require cleanup. ### Source excerpt LLMs are great at pattern detection. Use them long enough, and you get good at it too. Smoking guns, being absolutely right, it's not X but Y. They tend to be cute at first, but then these AI-isms become bad jokes after only a few conversations. Now that I can practically recite all of the dumb shit robots say, I'm starting to see it more and more from humans. That's not to say I see humans using AI-isms, I'm starting to see new patterns emerge. Maybe they've been there the whole time and I'm only now starting to notice. The one I particularly dislike is taking two disparate things, and attempting to use them as inference towards your biased opinion on things. My favorite one thus far cites that every company that has embraced vibe coding now has a 30 second page load or is completely unusable. This was the math behind an eye roll "programming is dead" quip. I guess if you just got here, this makes sense to you. Fun fact, there's always been slow websites. Like, forever. I've been both the contributing factor to slow websites as well as the savior that fixed them for nearly three decades. Most of which didn't include vibe coding. Fine, the robots still go off the rails, and need a lot of guard rails. But to jump to the conclusion that if something is slopped together by an LLM it's complete shit is... it's fucking dumb short sighted at BEST. We're all biased in one way or another. Clearly I'm in the camp that these new technologies are good, and are going to elevate us all. I also find that those sort of opinions are clearly made by people that aren't working with the tools. If they are, they are trying to find the holes to poke, rather than figuring out how we can work past them. I've been operating more and more in an end state with agentic coding. Where can I produce results? How can I remove myself from the things I find to be a waste of time? How do I balance it all while maintaining code and product quality. There are people moving faster than me. They trust t