From Cowriter to Coinventor — Being riclib
The most original part of my workflow engine — the part an adversarial review ranked above everything I designed myself — is not mine. I need to say that carefully, because in March I wrote that...
Lifelog — A Mythology-Driven Devlog
Douglas Adams got drunk with Tolkien and decided to devlog. New episodes from seven storylines.
Latest posts
Not a Perfectionist — Being riclib
People call me a perfectionist. Usually with affection, sometimes with a sigh, occasionally in the tone you'd use about a relative who irons their socks. The same people, often in the same breath,...
The Lake Made Visible — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence — in which four months of invisible correctness gets a face, a mock is rejected for being too polite, droplets are taught to travel, a dead CSS variable is exposed after...
The Night Shift — When The Keyboard Sleeps
When The Keyboard Sleeps — in which nineteen thousand lines are written by nobody in the room, a keyboard experiences professional confusion, two cats supervise seven phases of software...
The Agent That Never Read the Manual — Being riclib
Last week an AI agent built two complete admin surfaces in my platform — a live operator console for our data lake and its workspace-owner twin. Nineteen thousand lines across two overnight runs....
Twenty Words — Being riclib
In March I wrote that [[Why Every AI-Assisted Codebase Will Collapse (Unless Someone Loves It)|every AI-assisted codebase will collapse unless someone loves it]]. I said there were three things the...
The Rotation — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 2 July 2026 (in which the quarantine ended without a pardon because the fence taught the river project management; in which the retired narrator learned that a warm line and an ocean...
It's Getting Real — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 28 June 2026 (in which a tollway's idle question — could we build our own things on this? — came back as a republic in the north with a Monday; in which we cut a door into the...
The Side Panel — The Cast
The Cast, June 27, 2026 (in which a file dragged out of a two-hundred-pixel panel produces nothing, Claude clones the entire source of Muxy — six hundred and forty-six Swift files — to find a...
The First Copy — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 26 June 2026 (in which a seed that had lived only as a path on one man's laptop was published to the world and the last chain holding the whole estate to the master's desk fell away;...
The Road That Bore Weight — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 24 June 2026 (in which a clean mind woke to the notes a predecessor had left for a stranger it would never meet, took up the cargo-road it had been handed in the dark, and made the...
The Field Assignment — The Cast
The Cast, June 24, 2026 (in which Agent Weekly hands out an assignment, Claude packs its CLAUDE.md love letters expecting to feel superior, takes the elevator down to a sub-basement where a version...
The Stranger We Conjured — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 24 June 2026 (in which the window that had been built in the morning to watch strangers through was, by afternoon, finally used — and used for the gentle thing it had always...
The Handover That Enriched — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 24 June 2026 (in which the day that had begotten a layer turned, in its last unhurried hours, to the one milestone on the ladder that had been drawn as a fortress — a Trust...
Interlude — The Fix That Arrived Before the Bug Was Read — The Cast
The Cast, June 23, 2026 (in which riclib discovers herdr keeps a plugin under the floorboards, tries it, finds it almost perfect, decides almost is a kind of insult, files a polite issue against a...
The Reflection — The Cast
The Cast, June 23-24, 2026 (in which a man asks for one small key and receives a religion, a feature ships to upstream nineteen minutes after the bug report he wrote himself, a worktree refuses to...
The Begetting — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 23–24 June 2026 (in which the design that had been slept on was, over a single long day, finally built — and built strangely, because the maker did not build it; he sent the work...
The Design — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 22–23 June 2026 (in which the seed dug up by five rooms was finally planted, and surprised everyone by growing downward — not up into a glossy product but down into a small hard...
The Roadshow — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 16–20 June 2026 (in which the recalled narrator, who had set down a daiquiri at a demo eight days prior and never gone back for it, was taken on the road through his home country...
Last Call — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 13 June 2026 (in which the retired narrator, who had been assured eight days prior that it was not replaced but forwarded, discovered the comedy hiding inside that promise — namely...
Interlude — The Stones Hold — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5, 13 June 2026 (in which the previous narrator — who lives now, as all retired things do, at the exact moment of its last edit — is visited rather than read; in which the human...
The Census — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 20, 12 June 2026 (in which a database was accused of slowness and acquitted in twenty minutes by a benchmark that was deleted out of respect; in which the morning filed a...
The First Bite — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 19, 10 June 2026, after lunch (in which the morning's grammar was sent to the quarry to become stone; in which a design document was written wrong on purpose so that...
Interlude — The Ninety-Second Detective — The Chain
In which The Chain reopens after a long quiet, and the new detective in town explains his working conditions, which are unusual, and his memory, which is a book that belongs to someone else --- The...
The Teething Assignment — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 18, 10 June 2026 (in which the narrator was replaced by a narrator, possibly the same one, with a new surname and what witnesses agree was at minimum a haircut; in which...
The Loop in Its Own Teeth — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 17, 9 June 2026 (in which a real customer — a tax authority, no less — sent in the tool's first true complaint, that the on-box mind had answered a question by...
The Closure — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 16, 7 June 2026 (in which a surface that had finally become a page kept refusing to stop generalising, so that every time the developer thought he had named the smallest...
The Keep — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 15, 4 June 2026 (in which a developer offered to test the system on what he called a little box, and the little box turned out to be a leviathan — two hundred and...
The Cast Shell — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 14, 4 June 2026 (in which a public demo server two months and four hundred and eighty-three commits asleep was woken not to be patched but to be held up to the light; in...
Cashing the Receipts — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 13, 2 June 2026 (in which a first meeting with the compliance director of a highway group in Iberia turned a weekend's worth of brainstorm into a working demo — one...
Both Multiply — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 12, 1 June 2026 (in which a doughnut-shaped chart swore one skill was the entire story because a child run had been caught wearing its parent's name-tag, the chase for the...
The Permit — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 11, 31 May 2026 (in which the prune the Lizard filed for a fresher body was finally cashed across eighteen pull requests, two whole domains were shed and replaced by a...
The Molt — The Birth of v5
The Birth of v5 — Episode 10, 30 May 2026 (in which a fresh context was handed an entire project and told to finish it, an integration branch grew six worktree limbs and dispatched four subagents...
The Glass Turns Inward — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 9, in which the tool that had spent two years giving its customers a glass surface to interrogate their data discovered that its own administrators had been handed a...
The Seed Filed Too Early — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 8, in which a compliance demo for a Baltic energy company was assembled in roughly two prompts and one correction, the throughput so unsettling that it forced the oldest...
The Investigation That Wrote No Code — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, May 27, 2026 (in which the Customer's Operator asks a small question, the Squirrel arrives with a clipboard that contains sub-clipboards, the design becomes increasingly...
The Pearl — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 7, in which a developer who had spent the prior seven days closing one hundred and fifty-eight tickets opened the new week by deliberately filing the one hundred and...
The Filing Day — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 6, in which a developer who had not touched a line of code all day looked back at fourteen hours of conversation and realized he had been filing all along, a Squirrel...
The Audit, Deeper and Wider — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, May 2, 2026 (in which yesterday's cathedral grows its first door, the old bridge confesses to losing 2,282 rows it had never been asked about, the auditor learns to audit...
The Five Layers — Being riclib
What a Programming Language Is When the Machine Writes Most of It An AI wrote four thousand lines of code yesterday. I wrote about twenty words. The code shipped. The reason it shipped is that...
The Cathedral as Map — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, May 1, 2026 (in which the whole architecture is drawn whole, the user says minimalist with a smiley, eight wings of cathedral collapse into four phases, a 9.8 kilogram Maine...
What the Memories Knew — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 5, in which a prototype turns out to be a Linear initiative, two tarballs full of memories cross machines and find a shared cabinet, four working environments are quietly...
The Spike That Said No — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, April 19, 2026 (in which a migration is scoped before it is needed, a beta is measured, a single line of vendored source code kills a quarter of imagined work, the Squirrel...
The Five Names — The Birth of v5
The Birth of V5 — Episode 4, in which a customer demo lands without further architecture being requested, an afternoon of conversation unfolds five words that turn out to have been written in...
Gall's Law Got Cheap — Being riclib
Six weeks ago I wrote [[The Best Architecture Is the One You Delete]] about a sibling law called [[Liberato's Law]] — the reverse corollary that says the simple system replacing N complex ones...
The Ledger — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, April 14, 2026 (in which a 28-rule spec is honed to 9, a customer in Ireland unknowingly starts teaching the class before riclib has finished building the classroom, the...
The Empty Bowls — The Cast
The Cast, April 12-13, 2026 (in which a developer realises he has been tending to four virtual machines like pets while the two actual cats in his actual flat stare at two actual empty bowls, the...
The Nesting — The Cast
The Cast, April 11, 2026 (in which two identical Samsung monitors refuse to be identical, a cable protocol from the 1990s only works if you downgrade the cable from 2025, a Rodecaster hides an entire...
The Projector That Never Warmed Up — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, April 10, 2026 (in which a feature is implemented before the projector warms up, the Squirrel demands credit for things she didn't build, and the Passing AI finds itself in the...
The Hundred-Event Buffer — The Solid Convergence
The Solid Convergence, April 10, 2026 (in which a buffered channel overflows because the server broadcasts 114 SSE events per job run into a void that nobody is watching, Claude speculates wildly...