Intelligence Intelligence

Lots of businesses now have an agent doing real work. Few could tell you what it did yesterday.

I've spent fifteen years building Laravel and WordPress systems, and most of them came down to who is allowed to do what. Agents ask the same question of a business. I build the answer into the system you already run.

40%+

of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, says Gartner. Cost and unclear value are two of its reasons. Weak risk controls are the third.¹ Gartner, June 2025

One door in.

WordPress² and Laravel³ both ship MCP servers now, and installing one takes minutes. Deciding what it should expose takes longer, because that list is the whole of your risk.

I go through your data with you and hand the agent a short list of named operations. Everything else stays invisible to it.

An isometric drawing of four lanes from an agent to your CMS. posts.read passes an open gate. posts.update and orders.refund each pass a gate with a person beside it. users.delete is stopped at a closed gate.

1 in 4

UK workers spend seven or more hours a week copying information between apps and feeding it to AI tools.⁴Workday and The Harris Poll, May 2026

Ask before it deletes.

On 25 April 2026 a coding agent deleted a startup's production database and its backups in nine seconds. The token it used had been made to manage domain names. Nothing stopped it deleting everything else.⁵

I scope each credential to one kind of job and put a person in front of anything that can't be undone. It costs one click.

An isometric drawing: an agent in staging uses a token made for domain names, calls the platform API, and the red volumeDelete call reaches a volume holding both the production database and its backups.

OWASP's 2026 list for agent security calls this Least Agency.⁶

Read the site. Skip the drafts.

When people ask for a model trained on their own data, they nearly always want retrieval. It stays current, and it can point to the page an answer came from.

The usual failure is an index that forgot which pages were private. Then the assistant quotes an unpublished post to a customer. I carry your CMS permissions all the way into the search, which is the part most setups leave out.

66%

of developers say their biggest frustration with AI is answers that are almost right. Retrieval that cites its page lets someone check.⁷Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2025

An isometric drawing: published pages pass through a permission gate into the index; a draft and a private page are stopped at the gate. The index answers a person, naming its source page.

Receipts.

Every call the agent made, what it changed, and whose name is on the approval. Written for the person who has to explain it on Monday.

An isometric drawing of a log as a row of sheets. One entry at 09:15 is approved by the editor; one at 09:22, a refund, is refused as over the limit.

Pick one, or start at the top.

Before agents, it was payments.

Most of my past work was approval logic under another name.

A fintech expense platform with five user roles, where some payments needed more than one person to sign off.
Subscription renewals on a Laravel platform that had been failing without anyone noticing. They stopped.
A sync of ten thousand records into Salesforce that could run twice and change nothing the second time.

The thing being approved has changed. The design problem is the same one.