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Every page and article on Dustin Hyle in one place, organized by topic.

Best Posts

Start here. The handful of posts that best capture what Dustin Hyle writes about: small business technology, AI, and what he has learned from years of keeping client sites running. If you are new here, read these first.

Why Small Businesses Can Finally Compete Again : Cheaper AI-driven software makes niche, industry-specific tools viable. Dustin explains why that shift could pull customers from generic platforms.
How AI Search Is Bringing Back Old-School Branding : Working with local businesses, Dustin Hyle sees AI shifting digital marketing toward brand awareness, rewarding companies people recognize by name.
WordPress Website Speed Optimization Guide : Drawing on 17 years of WordPress work, Dustin Hyle covers his process for analyzing site speed and fixing the issues that slow most sites down.

AI Insights

What I'm noticing about AI, content, and the stuff most people miss. Hidden text characters, how AI search changes branding, and why you can't just trust whatever ChatGPT tells you. "The Hidden Risk of Copy-Pasting AI Content" is a warning and a heads-up: if you copy and paste out of an AI tool, there are most likely hidden characters in the text that act as code telling others you copied it from AI. Most people have no idea.

AI Means You Never Have to Be the Smartest in the Room : I don't have to change rooms to find smarter people anymore. AI gives me a world-class thinking partner on demand.
Why Max AI Effort Isn't Always Best : Maxing out AI effort often means higher costs and worse outcomes. Trying medium or high settings can give you better efficiency for your budget.
Why a CLI-Based Coding Agent Is One of the Best Tools You Can Install : CLI-based coding agents give you direct system access that desktop apps can't match. Keep files local, switch models freely, and maintain context.
Why I Built My Own AI Tool Instead of Paying a Subscription : Dustin Hyle explains why he had Claude build a local AI tool in an afternoon instead of paying a subscription, and when he plans to release it.
Why Defining 'Good' Is the Key to Achieving Your Goals : Dustin Hyle on why defining what 'good' actually looks like is the key to hitting your goals, instead of vague aims like 'get better' or 'improve.'
Future-Proof Your Security in the AI Age : Dustin Hyle argues that minimizing your attack surface and running custom personal systems are the real defenses in an AI-driven threat landscape.
How Claude Code Fixed Our Fragile Phone System : Claude Code built a call scheduler for a legacy phone system his team had avoided for years, showing what AI-assisted development can accomplish.
When AI Finally Spoke My Language : Dustin reflects on the first time an AI email suggestion matched exactly what he would have written, and what it reveals about when to trust AI tools.
The Hidden Risk of Copy-Pasting AI Content : AI-generated text often contains invisible watermark characters that trigger security filters and prevent content from saving or publishing correctly.
How AI Search Is Bringing Back Old-School Branding : Working with local businesses, Dustin Hyle sees AI shifting digital marketing toward brand awareness, rewarding companies people recognize by name.
Why We Can't Blindly Trust AI Responses : Dustin draws on low-quality content ranking and AI model poisoning to argue for treating AI output as a data point rather than a final decision.

Business Tech

Technology in the context of running a business. Bad websites, industry rules that don't actually matter, and what happens when AWS goes down and takes half the internet with it. "Industry Rules Revisited" comes from something I've noticed over years in this business: most of what we obsess over does not actually matter. That post lays out what does.

Why Max AI Effort Isn't Always Best : Maxing out AI effort often means higher costs and worse outcomes. Trying medium or high settings can give you better efficiency for your budget.
Why I Built My Own AI Tool Instead of Paying a Subscription : Dustin Hyle explains why he had Claude build a local AI tool in an afternoon instead of paying a subscription, and when he plans to release it.
Industry Rules Revisited : Dustin Hyle examines why industry rules outlast the conditions that created them, and how one simple question can become the start of real disruption.
Why Are Big Company Websites So Bad? : Dustin describes a hospital payment portal so broken it resembled phishing, and what that means for any business that lets its website erode trust.
The AWS Outage Nobody Saw Coming : Dustin Hyle uses a real AWS outage to show how businesses not on AWS can still lose email and services through hidden vendor dependencies.

General

The posts that do not fit one lane. "Why Small Businesses Can Finally Compete Again" is the main one, an argument that specialized software is finally letting small operators go after the things big companies used to own.

Why Defining 'Good' Is the Key to Achieving Your Goals : Dustin Hyle on why defining what 'good' actually looks like is the key to hitting your goals, instead of vague aims like 'get better' or 'improve.'
Why Small Businesses Can Finally Compete Again : Cheaper AI-driven software makes niche, industry-specific tools viable. Dustin explains why that shift could pull customers from generic platforms.

WordPress

WordPress, the platform I've been building on since 2007. Security cleanups, speed optimization, and what I've learned from nearly two decades of keeping client sites running. "Keeping WordPress Sites Secure" starts with a simple sentence: I cleaned another WordPress site this morning. That's the reality of running WordPress sites, and this post breaks down what I look for and what you should too.

Keeping WordPress Sites Secure: A Morning Cleanup Story : Dustin Hyle traced a site cleanup to years-old plugin vulnerabilities, showing why regular plugin updates are the simplest defense for WordPress.
WordPress Website Speed Optimization Guide : Drawing on 17 years of WordPress work, Dustin Hyle covers his process for analyzing site speed and fixing the issues that slow most sites down.
Reasons Why Website Speed Kills Your Business : Dustin Hyle explains how slow load times hurt search rankings and drive away visitors, costing businesses customers before they see what is on offer.
Meeting Matt Mullenweg at WCUS : Dustin Hyle recounts a conversation with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US on WordPress and AI that ran until the venue shut down.
How I Optimize Images for Free with Squoosh : Dustin Hyle walks through his process for using Squoosh with MozJPEG to compress website images and cut file sizes without a noticeable quality drop.