Tools

Most of my life I used Windows for gaming, and Linux for development. When I started my first full time job in 2007, they gave me a Windows desktop for Java dev, and I hated it… In 2010 they added a BYOC policy and two devs I worked with convinced me to buy my first ever Mac, and since then, that’s what I’ve been using. Mainly because I dialed in my perfect setup early, and migrating an old Mac to a new Mac is super easy, and once I got my iPad and eventually settled on iPhone (after jumping between that and Android every 2 years for a while), I was locked into the ecosystem, and no matter how much it gets enshittified, I just haven’t been able to migrate away (and I’ve tried, quite a few times). ...

Background Okay, so this post is a follow up to a few different posts, but most notably The Token Saving Cake is a Lie. Before reading this one, I highly recommend checking that out first. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Back? Good. Let’s continue. Headroom So I said that the solution is probably something like Lynkr, but before building the integration, I discovered Headroom (45k stars, Python, its own trained compression model, ships RTK as a component). It does everything the Lynkr plan described, supposedly better. Set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8787, run headroom wrap claude, done. ...

Introduction In some ways, a lot has changed since my last post, and in other ways, not much has changed. There has been a big shift in the last 12 months, especially toward “agentic engineering” and how we run multi-agent AFK setups vs HITL as we have been. I touched on this in my introduction to the tool I’m working on as well, which, spoiler, is part of my toolchain. Kinda. It’s a WIP… ...

Introduction I came across caveman-compression — a tool that compresses text into a token-efficient “caveman” format before sending it to an LLM. The pitch is simple: It can cut 30-65% of tokens depending on the content, which at Claude Opus prices adds up fast. I immediately wanted to wire it into Claude Code so compression would happen automatically on every prompt. The obvious hook was UserPromptSubmit. ...

I never posted why I paused development on So This Is How I Die. If you’ve been following the devlog, you’ll know the story up to a point. The slow progress, the balancing act with client work, the occasional “I’m having a hard time” entry that I posted because solo dev accountability sometimes means confessing that nothing is on fire, you’re just tired. What you won’t find is a post that says this is where I stopped, and here’s why. ...

I’ve been sitting on this comparison for a while, trying to decide if it was too obvious to write about. Then a good friend of mine DM’d me on Slack about “every vibe coding tech bro is now vibe coding a dashboard to ‘monitor the global situation’. my feed is full of it.” with some screenshots of the kind of stuff that’s popping up everywhere. And it just reminded me; I’m not imagining this. ...

Trigger warning: This post contains opinions. Specifically mine. It also contains a confession or two, which I’m not thrilled about, but here we are. I don’t have many people in tech I actively look up to. The industry is drowning in loud, obnoxious voices who are very good at having opinions and very bad at having done anything. But Carmack is one of the rare exceptions. He’s always been the quiet, thoughtful one. The hacker in the original sense; someone who understands systems deeply enough to bend them, who ships because building is the point, not the clout. I’ve written before about my own struggle with that identity vs. the need to actually make money, that tension between doing the craft and doing the business. Carmack, for most of his career, has never had to compromise on that. He gets to just build. ...

🧠 Something I’ve been thinking about a lot after doing these AI coding experiments… I get why non-devs enjoy this so much. Creating something cool gives you a dopamine hit. Solving a problem does it too. Just like how YT Shorts, IG Reels, TikTok and even LinkedIn these days give you these hits through scrolling, these AI tools do it by “doing, showing, doing, showing”. ...

Intro I posted over on LinkedIn about an interesting comparison between Lovable and Bolt.new which I did. I had this idea for my next Flutter project, but after being hit by the 5th LinkedIn post about Lovable in as many minutes, I had this thought. 😂😂😂 No, actually, the thought was more along the lines of ...

In some of my previous posts I’ve talked about playing around with “vibe coding” tools, more specifically the more hands-on ones like Cursor and Windsurf where I can still jump in if needed. Every time I have an idea for a silly or stupid app just for myself, I tend to gravitate towards these tools, not because I can’t be arsed to do it myself, but because I’m genuinely curious about how well these perform and how much they improve over time. ...