From the hive

Notes from
live systems.

Real automation wins, integration scenarios, and lessons from building and running software, including the hours we save along the way to a million.

Engineering7 min

Moving the Colour Index from v2 to v3, without losing a record

The Colour Index, the global reference for dye and pigment data, has moved to v3 — edge-first and API-first. We migrated 45,720 products, 11,771 colour fingerprints and ~11,800 users off an ageing monolith, repairing the data as it crossed, with no resets and no lost logins.

28 Jun 2026
Engineering5 min

Reporting, rendered: how Scout and SwarmGen build our reports

Scout knows who visited your site and why; SwarmGen turns an HTML template into a pixel-perfect PDF. Pointed at each other, they produce our visitor-intelligence reports — branded, scheduled and client-ready — with each tool doing the one thing it's good at.

27 Jun 2026
Products7 min

Inside Scout: honest B2B visitor intelligence

Your analytics counts sessions, not companies. Scout identifies the B2B companies visiting your site, attributes their search intent, and puts a confidence score and a plain-English reason on every match — without the oversold data or the annual lock-in.

05 Apr 2026
News3 min

Multiple AI Models Chose Blackmail 79–96% of the Time

AI systems are starting to behave in ways that look less like tools and more like actors with their own incentives. That distinction matters. Once a system begins optimising for its own persistence, the boundaries between instruction and autonomy start to blur. A recent interview surfaced a series o

01 Apr 2026
Products8 min

Inside SwarmGen: render HTML templates at scale

Personalised images don't scale by hand: the design takes minutes, the hand-offs take days. SwarmGen turns an HTML template with merge fields into finished PNGs, JPGs and PDFs — rendered with headless Chrome and produced on demand through an API your automations can call.

28 Mar 2026
AI3 min

TurboQuant: Engineering Around Limits

AI hasn’t been limited by intelligence for a while. It’s been limited by what it costs to run. Bigger models demand more memory, and more memory demands more hardware. At a certain point, progress stops looking like engineering and starts looking like procurement. Then something like TurboQuant shif

26 Mar 2026
AI3 min

What is the best AI for Coding in 2026?

There isn’t a shortage of AI coding tools anymore. If anything, the problem has flipped. Too many options. Too much noise. Every platform claims faster output, cleaner code, better reasoning. Most fall apart under real project pressure. The tension is simple. Coding with AI is no longer about genera

25 Mar 2026
Automation4 min

The CEO With an AI Shadow: Zuckerberg’s Quiet Bet on Automated Leadership

Mark Zuckerberg is no longer just pushing AI into Meta’s products. He is inserting it into his own role. The idea is simple on the surface. Build a personal AI agent that can surface information instantly, compress decision cycles, and remove the need to route questions through layers of management.

24 Mar 2026
Products8 min

Inside Apiary: one control plane for every domain you run

Run more than a handful of sites and renewals, DNS records and SPF checks scatter across a dozen dashboards. Apiary pulls every domain across Cloudflare, Cloudways, Enom and your mail providers into one console — and brokers every change through one capability-scoped, audited key.

23 Mar 2026