What we're building, week of October 5

Last week's note promised a real request through the portal from start to finish and a few more calls to Pam. The portal part happened. A client asked for six changes, they were built and reviewed, the client approved them, and they went live on Monday. Pam took calls and nothing broke. The bigger story this week is what happened while I was asleep.

A night shift, and what it took to trust it

My to-do list had grown to 1,500 lines, and most of it was notes about things already done. On Tuesday night I had it cut to the open items only, and I set a rule for the night: anything that didn't need my approval could be built while I slept, on side branches, with nothing pushed, deployed or sent.

Ten AI agents ran at once, each in its own copy of the code, each with a written set of limits. By morning there were about thirty changes. A watcher for the promises on our privacy and accessibility pages. A monthly market report generator. A results page for clients. A dozen smaller things.

Here is the part that matters if you're wondering whether to trust work like that. None of it shipped on its own. The next afternoon every file was read in full before it was merged. The reading found two things the night missed. A menu item would have shown up for every client before the page behind it existed. A link had a stray space in it. Both were fixed before anything went live. Three of the tasks turned out to be already done or unsafe, and the agents said so instead of inventing work. One was told to drop a database function and refused. It had found the client portal still using it. That refusal was worth more than the other twenty-nine commits.

That's the shape of how we use AI. It does the work of a full team overnight. An engineer reads every line in the morning and owns what goes out.

What your website produced

Clients on a managed plan can now see what their site did this month against last month, in their portal. Visits. Quote requests started. Quote requests sent. Calls tapped from a phone. And the two rates between them.

Two choices in it are worth explaining. First, this month so far is compared with the same number of days last month, not the whole month. Otherwise every site looks like it fell off a cliff on the 9th. Second, a percentage only appears once there are at least twenty people to measure against. Below that you see the plain counts. "50%" from one person out of two is noise dressed as a number.

The numbers travel as counts only. No visitor data leaves a client's own database. The page sends nothing that could be tampered with, because the server decides whose numbers to show from the signed-in account.

Write to privacy@, get an answer in minutes

Our privacy policy promises an answer within 30 days to anyone who asks what we hold about them. This week we gave that promise an address, privacy@carpenterwebworks.com, and something behind it.

Write to it and you get one reply back, usually within ten minutes. It says we received your message. It says what our database holds under the address you wrote from, or that nothing is filed under it. It says what happens next. The reply is built from fixed sentences, not generated. It only lists records when the email provably came from the address it claims to. Nobody can get your records by pretending to be you. It never deletes anything on its own. A deletion is done by a person and confirmed to you. If you write back because the answer wasn't what you needed, no second automatic reply goes out. I get an email and a flag, and I answer you myself.

I tested it from a personal address before publishing the page. It did exactly that.

One mistake, so you hear it from us

On Saturday a test suite on my workstation published a handful of its placeholder posts to our Facebook Page. A test had cleared its safety switches, then loaded them back from a settings file I had changed that week. I deleted the posts within the hour and the test can't read that file anymore. If you saw "Staged with a slot, published now" in your feed, that was us, and that's what it was.

Pictures for market day

We'll be at an event on October 17, and if you're setting up a booth that day too, come find ours. Getting ready for it, we noticed every post about markets was wearing the same photo. So there's now a set of six. The canopy going up at sunrise. The cloth going on the table. The row under string lights at dusk. One line from the set, for anyone who sells at a market: one Saturday a month, people can walk up. The other twenty-nine days, they look you up.

Next week

The first market report for a trade we've scanned is built and waiting on my read. If it holds up, it's next week's note.

Written with AI, signed by an engineer.