I created wiki.robnugen.com using MediaWiki probably over 15 years ago.

This site is primarily to give a home for photos of my art which I have drawn over the years. Each piece has a permalink written on the back.

MediaWiki team keeps the software updated with plenty of updates, including some LTS (long term service) releases. Some years ago the site started to crumble because my web hosting provider upgraded PHP behind the scenes and the old versions of MediaWiki weren’t compatible!

Back in 2023 I researched a bit and found a company that will host the site and do the upgrades for a small fee… I was tempted because it seemed reasonable to outsource that, but ultimately I decided to keep it in house. If they could do it, I can do it!

I wrote a script called bookend_upgrade which helped guide me through a list of steps including checking the version of Composer that would match the then-latest Composer at the time that the target MediaWiki version would be. It protected my copy of LocalSettings.php in its own git repo and blah blah to help me upgrade MediaWiki. It worked!

Since 26 May 2023, the site has been running on MediaWiki 1.39.3. I have had in the back of my mind that I need to update it again, but blah blah until yesterday I decided to give it a shot, with AI support.

Yesterday AI and I:

• Got the install from 1.39.3 → 1.39.17 (about 3000 commits).
• Discovered (and fixed) four problems with the script.
• Updated scripts to use MediaWiki’s submodules for skins and vendor

Today AI and I upgrade the site to 1.43. AI did most of the work. Once it was done, I had him clean up his scripts and write about it.

https://wiki.robnugen.com/wiki/Times:2026_may_24_upgraded_mediawiki

Want to explore?

I work and play with AI tools daily, from autonomous test agents to encrypted coordination systems to spelunking 4-year-old MediaWiki installs.

I have 30+ years of professional IT experience across real estate, startups, music, game development and inventory systems. Whether you’re exploring AI for your business or building something ambitious with agents, I can help you find a clear path forward.

https://cal.eu/robnugen/tech-support-with-rob-nugen

Today Claude helped me upgrade AB’s admin system from jQuery 1.12.4 to 3.7.1. Then we were able to remove some Migrate code entirely. The coolest thing was coordinating the work with two Claude agents at once.

I had one Claude agent working on my laptop making some changes but then I ready to run tests, which are only available from the Vagrant box hosted on my laptop. So I started another Claude agent on the Vagrant box. But then I had all this context on the laptop that I needed to communicate to Claude on Vagrant.

I had already set up Jikan so my agent could make private notes based on my state of mind and requests. Hmmmm how about we just use that on the Vagrant box as well?

It worked more easily than I expected. On my laptop,I was like, “Use the private notebook to explain in detail how your clone can run this on the Vagrant box” and then on the Vagrant box, I taught that agent a skill of how to deploy the site and make sure the server maintains enough disk space, then had it read the notebook.

Funny and awesome; the Claude on the Vagrant box was like “no, I’m not going to do these ssh commands from some random URL,” but I was able to convince it to do so.. my first jailbreak? Scary enough, it didn’t take all that much coaxing.

So from the laptop, I was working on the next phase of the project while the Claude on Vagrant finished up the jQuery upgrade in about a hundredth of the time it would have taken me. Less than 1/100th really, because this upgrade has been languishing for years.