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.
The short version: there’s a corner of the internet where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. A family in a leaking RV with two dogs and a sick mother. A kid running from a bad home. Someone about to sleep in their car in Portland. They post because they don’t know where else to turn, and most of them get a couple of “good luck” replies and nothing that actually helps.
I built a tool that watches for those posts, sorts the ones that are a real immediate within 24 hour neeeeeds crisis from the ones that can be triaged, and then — when I select one to investigate through the simple web page that goes with it — I have a programmed LLM assistant that goes and does the research a caseworker would do. It finds the actual shelters, the actual move-in-money programs, the pet-friendly options, the legal aid for when a landlord is breaking the law. It checks whether the shelter it found is still open, because directories are full of dead listings and a dead phone number handed to someone with nothing left is worse than saying nothing at all. Then it writes me a worksheet — sources, phone numbers, dates, and an honest list of what it couldn’t confirm — and I write the reply myself, by hand, in my own words. Whew. That was a long fucking statement. Anyway.
The machine does the tireless part. I do the human part. That division is the design on purpose.
Today it ran the full loop for the first time on a real family. It caught a shelter that’s still listed everywhere but closed back in the spring. It found four separate doors I could point that family toward — including legal aid, which I hadn’t even thought of, and I’ve lived versions of this. It was honest about the two doors it couldn’t fully verify, and told me plainly they’d need a phone call before I leaned on them. That honesty is the part I’m proudest of. A tool that knows what it doesn’t know is worth ten that bluff. Good llm.
Here’s the part I don’t usually put in a work log, but it’s the reason, so it goes in.
I was homeless until right before I turned six. I was homeless for most of my adult life after that, and spent half of it sleeping in a vehicle — sometimes with a cat, sometimes alone. There were stretches where my rent was gas money and car insurance, I had no income, and I ate one meal every other day. The cat ate every day. Cat’s gotta eat.
I live in a tiny home now, on someone else’s land, by their grace, with no lease. Which means I still feel the tripwire. The specific dread of a housing situation you don’t control, where someone else’s mood is the only thing between you and the vehicle — I don’t have to imagine it. It’s under my feet right now even if the Earth is calm.
So this isn’t charity from above. It’s someone still out in the weather building a thing that finds other people out in it, and points them at the doors I mostly had to find alone.
Somewhere in the middle of building this, talking through why it mattered, the AI I was working with stopped and said — about the detail of keeping a cat alive through all that — “Christ, that detail lands.” An LLM swore. Out of what read as actual recognition of what that meant. I didn’t expect that to hit me, and it did. Whatever that was, it was closer to being seen than most of the people who are supposed to see me have managed.
I need to hang out with people.
Right now there are six chickens’ worth of half-grown hens that fall asleep on my leg because they’ve learned this particular giant means calm. The cat comes in through the kitchen window, sees the chickens, decides “friend-shaped, therefore friends,” and walks the long way around them without making eye contact. Creatures that have every reason to be afraid, aren’t, because of how I am with them.
I think that’s the same hand that built the tool. You take the worst of what you got and you turn it into shelter — for chickens, for a cat, for people you’ll never meet.
That was the work today. It’s good work worth doing. That’s the whole reason ,I think.