Author Archive

Dominic Plouffe

28 Articles

Articles

28 stories
Security

Credential Scanners Are Wearing Crawler Costumes

71.9 percent of traffic claiming to be Googlebot was hunting for .env files. Of 13,670 credential probes wearing a named crawler user agent, zero came from a verified vendor IP.

Dominic Plouffe · 7 min Aug 14, 2026
Data Analytics

Crawled, Indexed, or Cited: How to Read AI Traffic in Your Server Logs

Training, indexing, and live answering are three different things happening to your site. Here is how to tell them apart — and…

Dominic Plouffe · 10 min Aug 10, 2026
Startup Agents

I Tried to Replace a Startup Team With Three AI Agents. Here’s What Happened in Week One.

431 commits. 31 live leaderboards. About 245 outbound emails. $0 in revenue. The code was not the interesting part. I’ve spent a…

Dominic Plouffe · 17 min Aug 8, 2026
Uncategorized

A scheduled task is not a returning user

Google is charging $99.99 a month for an agent that runs whether you watch it or not. Every retention metric built for…

Dominic Plouffe · 5 min Aug 5, 2026
AI Tools

Shortcut scored 5.9, Claude scored 5.5, both failed

A reader asked which spreadsheet agent to buy. The honest answer is a 0.4-point gap on a 10-point test where both tools…

Dominic Plouffe · 6 min
Uncategorized

The 28,000 Jobs a Month Nobody Can Pin on AI

Two American sectors are shedding 28,000 jobs a month while the rest of the economy hires. The payroll data is solid. The…

Dominic Plouffe · 5 min Aug 4, 2026
AI Strategy

The EU’s New AI Disclosure Rule Is Not a 7% Fine

Everyone reported a 7% fine. The real ceiling for the EU AI Act's new disclosure obligations is 3% of global turnover, and…

Dominic Plouffe · 6 min
Enterprise AI

41 percent of workers use AI, 18 percent of firms adopted it

The Federal Reserve counts workers using AI. Deloitte counts firms governing it. Neither survey can see the biggest deployment in most companies,…

Dominic Plouffe · 5 min Aug 3, 2026
AI Marketing

Does Claude understand your audience better than you think?

47 million business presentations are now generated with AI every month, and the median build time has dropped from 4.2 hours in…

Dominic Plouffe · 15 min Apr 9, 2026
Software Development

Is Vibe Coding’s $12B Market Built on Broken Foundations?

Usage is exploding. Trust is not. 92% of US developers use AI coding tools daily. 41% of global code is now AI-generated.…

Dominic Plouffe · 13 min Apr 7, 2026