# /dev/thoughts - Alex Moening

Technical notes, field observations, and occasional brain dumps from 25+ years of moving bits across the internet.

## Articles

### AI & Agents

#### [How I Taught My Agent to Shop](how-i-taught-my-agent-to-shop.md)
*March 18, 2026* | Tags: `AI Agents`, `AI Hacks on Tap`, `Home Automation`

Amazon won't let AI agents browse their shelves. But they left the back door wide open — a cart URL that takes ASINs and quantities as parameters. Here's how I used Claude Code to build a one-click bill of materials for a Home Assistant appliance.

#### [The Agentocene](the-agentocene.md)
*March 18, 2026* | Tags: `AI Agents`, `Edge Computing`, `Internet Infrastructure`

AI agents now generate more web requests than the humans they serve. The data from Cloudflare, Akamai, and the edge tells the story of a phase shift.

#### [Skills vs MCP — Why Your AI Needs an Orchestration Layer](skills-vs-mcp-orchestration-layer.md)
*March 11, 2026* | Tags: `MCP`, `Agent Experience`, `Architecture`, `Skills`

MCP gives your AI tools. Skills tell it when and how to use them. The ecosystem is figuring this out the hard way — and the data backs it up.

#### [Voice Is the New Interface: What I Saw at the AssemblyAI VoiceAI Meetup](voice-is-the-new-interface.md)
*March 10, 2026* | Tags: `Voice AI`, `AssemblyAI`, `Speech-to-Text`, `Agent Experience`

I attended the AssemblyAI VoiceAI meetup and walked away convinced that voice has crossed the threshold from promising demo to production-ready magic.

#### [I Gave My AI Agent the Keys to My Network](i-gave-my-ai-agent-the-keys-to-my-network.md)
*March 3, 2026* | Tags: `AI Hacks on Tap`, `MCP`, `Home Network`, `Home Automation`, `Agent Experience`

How I built an MCP server that lets my AI agent configure my firewall, manage VLANs, control smart home devices, and troubleshoot connectivity — all through natural language.

#### [The Night Agents Took the Stage](the-night-agents-took-the-stage.md)
*February 24, 2026* | Tags: `AI Hacks on Tap`, `Agent Experience`, `DevTools`

Six demos, one panel, and the uncomfortable question every dev tool company is dodging: are you building for agents, or are agents building around you?

#### [Making My Website Speak Robot](making-my-website-speak-robot.md)
*February 10, 2026* | Tags: `AI Hacks on Tap`, `CloudFront`, `AI Agents`, `Content Negotiation`

I've spent 25 years making content delivery efficient. When my own AI agent choked on my website, I fixed it in an afternoon. A month later, the industry is converging on the same idea from three directions.

### Security

#### [Three Booths That Told the Whole Story](three-booths-that-told-the-whole-story.md)
*March 26, 2026* | Tags: `Security`, `BSides SF`, `Supply Chain`, `Conference Recap`

At BSides SF 2026, fifty sponsors lined the floor. But three booths — Socket, DryRun Security, and C|Side — mapped the entire modern security stack from package registry to browser tab.

#### [Auditing Your Dependencies](auditing-your-dependencies.md)
*February 17, 2026* | Tags: `Security`, `Supply Chain`, `LLMs`, `DevOps`

A practical guide to building a security pipeline for third-party code, including LLM-assisted review.

#### [Supply Chain Roulette](supply-chain-roulette.md)
*February 14, 2026* | Tags: `Security`, `Supply Chain`, `Zero Trust`, `Incident Response`

I watched a supply chain attack unfold in real-time. Here's what I learned about trusting third-party code.

### Development

#### [Four Generations of Rendering 6,666 Characters at 60fps](four-generations-of-ascii-rendering.md)
*March 28, 2026* | Tags: `WebGL`, `Performance`, `React`, `Shaders`, `Animations`

From 6,500 DOM spans to variable-weight GLSL shaders — four generations of ASCII portrait rendering, each solving the last one's performance wall.

#### [Why React Changed How I Think About Building](why-react-for-everything.md)
*March 7, 2026* | Tags: `React`, `Frontend`, `Astro`, `Components`, `Animations`, `AI Tools`

From P5.js canvas hacks to React Three Fiber — the detour that taught me component thinking, even though the site landed on Astro.

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## Tags

- **Agent Experience** (`agent-experience`)
- **AI Agents** (`ai-agents`)
- **AI Hacks on Tap** (`ai-hacks-on-tap`)
- **AI Tools** (`ai-tools`)
- **Animations** (`animations`)
- **Architecture** (`architecture`)
- **AssemblyAI** (`assemblyai`)
- **Astro** (`astro`)
- **BSides SF** (`bsides-sf`)
- **CloudFront** (`cloudfront`)
- **Components** (`components`)
- **Conference Recap** (`conference-recap`)
- **Content Negotiation** (`content-negotiation`)
- **DevOps** (`devops`)
- **DevTools** (`devtools`)
- **Edge Computing** (`edge-computing`)
- **Frontend** (`frontend`)
- **Home Automation** (`home-automation`)
- **Home Network** (`home-network`)
- **Incident Response** (`incident-response`)
- **Internet Infrastructure** (`internet-infrastructure`)
- **LLMs** (`llms`)
- **MCP** (`mcp`)
- **Performance** (`performance`)
- **React** (`react`)
- **Security** (`security`)
- **Shaders** (`shaders`)
- **Skills** (`skills`)
- **Speech-to-Text** (`speech-to-text`)
- **Supply Chain** (`supply-chain`)
- **Voice AI** (`voice-ai`)
- **WebGL** (`webgl`)
- **Zero Trust** (`zero-trust`)

---

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*Copyright 2026 Alex Moening. Opinions expressed are my own.*