CEO and co-founder of Kief Studio. Full-stack developer and strategist. In tech since 2012. Served as Secretary of the TRaViS board until May 2026.
https://ameliasgagne.com172 articles
The whole industry optimizes to remove friction. But the case for friction is that a deliberate pause, a verification step, a rate limit, a cooling-off window, filters bots and bad actors, cuts regret and fraud, and protects the user.
A newly exposed cloud server gets its first probe in about 52 seconds. Small website attacks are automated and constant, not a big-company problem. Secure-by-construction absorbs the baseline.
A commercial kitchen stays safe by how it is built and run, not by a final inspection. That is secure by construction, and it is the same instinct behind good engineering: design the hazard out before it can happen.
You cannot bolt intelligence onto a business with no clean, connected data underneath. Why “just add AI” quietly fails, and what AI-ready data actually means.
In 2024, 51% of all web traffic was automated, so opt-in tools are built to miss most of what reaches your site. Analytics undercounting is the norm. Server-level measurement gives you the honest number.
Goodhart's Law says when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. Here is why small teams accidentally reward the number instead of the outcome, and how to build metrics that resist gaming.
Over 80% of workers use unapproved AI tools, and nearly half keep using personal accounts even after a ban. Govern shadow AI by enabling it: make the sanctioned path easier than the workaround.
Why more content loses in answer engine optimization: 147 posts on this site produced 13 cited URLs. Engines quote a distinct current passage, not the biggest library.
Capability-transfer engagements report 67% success against 22% for dependency consulting. AI capability transfer is the moment a client knows what the tool is, what it's worth, and that it's in their hands now. That click is the goal.
91% of deployed ML systems degrade over time, yet under 20% of organizations measure their automation. Automation maintenance, not the launch, is the real work. You automate to reach further, then monitor and improve.
In 2025 Sonatype counted 454,600 new malicious packages, and the easiest way in was phishing a trusted maintainer. Software supply chain risk is now a people problem, and the fix is verification cheap enough to actually use.
How AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend is a naming event. AI Overviews hit 2 billion monthly users in 2025. About 1.2 percent of local businesses get named in ChatGPT. Entity plus a specific page wins.
