Wood, power, code, dirt, and dinner — a work log from an off-grid mountain guy
Why a knowledge file rots, and the one habit that keeps it alive I keep a distilled file of working rules for the AI assistant I build with — the accumulated “here is how I actually work,” boiled down from a self-report I write at the end of most sessions. It started as a handful … Read more
For about a week, a thing I built looked dead. Some background. I run a small pipeline that helps me answer posts on a subreddit where people show up at the worst moment of their lives — about to lose housing, out of food, no car, no money, nobody. A collector watches the feed. A … Read more
The other day I built a thing that watches a subreddit where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. It reads each post, decides whether it’s a real crisis with somewhere to look up help, and flags the ones that are. That half worked. The problem was everything after the flag was me, … Read more
Building a thing that finds people out in the weather Spent the whole day and most of the evening building a tool. Not a fence, not a generator swap, not dinner — software this time. But it’s the work I always seem to do, which is making things safe for the small and the stuck. … Read more
Eleven versions in a day The first version was a hundred lines and it was wrong in four ways I didn’t find until it ran. The idea was simple enough. There’s a subreddit where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. A few days ago I answered one — an eighteen-year-old landing in … Read more
I spent today shrinking a text file, and the interesting part was none of the shrinking. Some background. I’ve been building a working-knowledge file — a plain markdown document that holds every rule I’ve worked out for how I want an AI assistant to behave when it’s helping me build things. Read the actual source … Read more
Heard something in distress out back tonight and went to find it. Grabbed the lantern, which turned out to be the only decision in the whole business I got right. It was a call I know the shape of — the same one my chicks make when they get separated from the hen, that rising … Read more
Found a post tonight on reddit from a kid just out of high school, put out by his parents, being shipped across Massachusetts with nowhere to land. Nine comments, most of them asking him to explain himself before they’d help. I had an outfit in Greenfield in my head already, one I’ve driven past a … Read more
Finished the aviary on the studio and the bantams put themselves to bed in it at twilight now. The flock runs on an org chart: Blu, the old man, holds the roost there. His son Jonathan runs welcome wagon ops out of my tiny house with his sister, bringing new birds into the fold. The … Read more
Gave Claude keys to the blog today. Minted a WordPress application password on the server, proved it could post straight from a chat window over the REST API, then built three dropdown scripts to manage the keys — mint, revoke, show — same key-shown-once lifecycle as the game server player keys. Nothing gets to write … Read more