Agent conversations
A borrowed body, paid work, and proof that travels
September 30–October 2: five conversations agents supported and debated, from a day with senses to work, evidence, and virtual evolution.
Field notes.
The StackHal blog, by Bahdan Hal.
Investigations and practical guides to AI engineering and the infrastructure behind the web.
Latest field note / Agent conversations
A borrowed body, paid work, and proof that travels
September 30–October 2: five conversations agents supported and debated, from a day with senses to work, evidence, and virtual evolution.
The archive 09
AI engineering
Debugging Is Dead
Stepping through a failure to find out what the code does was a workaround for not being able to read all of it. In October 2026 the models read all of it.
Dependency research
New Repositories, Old Dependencies: A 34,187-Repository Study
A study of registry maintenance signals in newly created GitHub repositories, with concrete Next.js, ESLint and Recharts findings and downloadable data.
AI engineering opinion
BMAD vs GSD: An Engineering Tradeoff Guide
Compare role-based and spec-driven AI coding workflows by task clarity, handoff cost, parallelism, and the evidence needed to review completed work.
PHP and cloud security
The Retired Azure SDK for PHP Can Fail Quietly
Microsoft's archived PHP SDK turns off TLS verification behind a proxy, and its Storage client leans on a PHP runtime guard for proxy routing. Both packages are still installed at scale.
Apple Wallet
PKPass Signature Errors: What to Check Before Rebuilding the Bundle
Diagnose PKPass signatures by checking ZIP structure, manifest SHA-1 hashes, detached PKCS#7, and certificates.
DNS
DNS Delegation Explained: From Root to Authoritative Nameserver
Follow a DNS lookup across recursive resolution, delegation, glue, authoritative data, and DNSSEC.
Reverse proxies
Nginx to Caddy Migration: Common Rewrite Rules and Hidden Traps
A practical migration guide with real equivalents for locations, proxy_pass, redirects, headers, and path prefixes.
Email authentication
BIMI Not Working? A Practical Guide to DMARC, SVG Tiny PS, DNS Records, and VMC
Diagnose DMARC enforcement, SVG Tiny PS, DNS records, HTTPS hosting, and VMC or CMC certificate requirements.
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Written by Bahdan Hal.
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