Chicago explorer coding recipes and building with AI. Adventures in food, tech, and learning.
I'm moving off single-provider AI subscriptions toward a stack of parts — Eve for agents, Vercel AI Gateway as the primary model access and billing layer with no-markup provider pricing, and OpenCode Go kept as the fallback — and the enterprise version of that stack is the real product.
OpenCode's CLI is bigger than 'type opencode and start a session.' Headless runs, provider auth, model discovery, MCP wiring, session archaeology, cost stats, and upgrades — the ten commands that carry daily work, with the doc gaps called out where they bite.
Second harness migration in two months. The always-on agent on my Mac mini now runs OpenCode on $10/mo open models instead of Claude Code, reachable from my phone over my own Buzz relay instead of Telegram. The interesting part: the swap was one line, because the protocol — not the model — is the actual seam.
Blistered cherry tomatoes and garlic collapse into a full pasta sauce in twenty minutes — no peeling, no seeding, finished with butter and pasta water.
Anthropic deleted 80% of Claude Code's system prompt for Opus 5 with no measurable loss. They called it unhobbling. Here's what that means for your harness.
Block's open-source Nostr workspace puts people and agents on the same cryptographic footing — and lands at the end of a long chain of thinking about where always-on agent infrastructure should actually live.
A Skill is packaged know-how. An Agent is that know-how put to work autonomously. Subagents are where the work scales past what any single context can hold.
OpenRouter lets you pick a different model for every step in a pipeline. Here's how to use Fable for planning and Sonnet for execution — with runnable TypeScript.
Instead of reading someone else's leaderboard, build a small set of tasks you actually care about and run them yourself every time a new model drops — Simon Willison's SVG pelican test, but for code.
In March I wrote the theory. Zach from Warp shipped the implementation. Here's how a working cloud factory maps to the architecture I laid out.
Most evals talk is about grading model output. Skill evals grade a different thing — the SKILL.md artifact you wrote — with real numbers from SkillsBench to back it up.
A small Python voice agent that remembers the thread, streams Claude's reply to the terminal, and speaks it aloud through ElevenLabs — no ffmpeg, just afplay.
Vercel launched an open-source agent framework at Ship London. The filesystem is the config, durable execution is built in, and deploy is just vercel deploy.
A Skill is reusable know-how Claude reaches for on its own. A Workflow is an explicit pipeline you wire up and control. Here's the difference, what you can build with each, and when to reach for which.
Three real ingredients — pecorino, pepper, pasta water — plus a knob of butter for insurance, tossed into a glossy sauce that never breaks.
How I worked with Claude through five rounds of image generation to design a logo for my Japanese learning app — and ended up inventing a kanji that hides a smile.
A plain-English walkthrough for setting up your own always-on AI assistant on a Mac mini — OpenClaw, Google Gemini, and Tailscale — written for a first-timer.
I love OpenClaw. I hate that it doesn't run on my Claude Pro subscription. Turns out Claude Code, with the Telegram channels plugin and one CLAUDE.md, is the same harness — minus the daemon, the API bill, and the second LLM provider. Here's the actual recipe, ported from a hotel in Tokyo to a Mac mini in Chicago in forty minutes.
A curated collection of high-quality skills for people who don't code — and an experiment in what actually makes a skill good.
A month that turned the "agentic turn" from talking point to shipping product. Google I/O, Opus 4.8, a $65B raise, and the infrastructure race to run your agents 24/7.
A five-ingredient Japanese-style spaghetti — butter, tamari, and parmesan tossed with hot pasta and finished with green onion. The wafu pasta I kept eyeing in Tokyo, made at home in ten minutes.
Microsoft's SkillOpt is the first paper to treat agent skill files as trainable parameters — propose an edit, evaluate on held-out examples, accept only on strict improvement. Here's what it found and what it means for teams building with agents.
OpenHuman is a desktop-first agentic assistant with persistent memory, 118+ OAuth integrations, and a token compression layer. Here's what it does and how it fits alongside an existing Claude Code harness.
Karpathy's four rules for agentic coding are worth reading — having them written down in a shared format is a useful starting point for anyone building with Claude Code.
How I moved magerbot's brain from @-imported markdown files into gbrain's Postgres-native semantic memory layer — what broke, what the gotcha was, and why the context model is fundamentally better.
阪神タイガース vs 中日ドラゴンズ @甲子園 — ライト側の応援席、売り子さんのビール、7回裏の風船、そしてサヨナラホームランで終わった忘れられない夜。
Hanshin Tigers vs. Chunichi Dragons at Koshien Stadium — the right-field cheering section, uriko beer vendors, 7th-inning balloons, and a walk-off home run to win it.
チケット争奪戦に出遅れ、ツアーに救われ、解説付きで観ると相撲がいかに面白いかを実感した一日。
We missed the original ticket sale, got rescued by a tour, and spent an afternoon learning how much more fun sumo is when someone helps you understand what you're watching.
I built a 200-line harness called conseiller to test Anthropic's new advisor tool — a fast executor model that consults a stronger model mid-generation. Two days later Anthropic shipped Claude Managed Agents, Multi-agent Orchestration, Dreams, Routines, and Remote Agents. Here's both halves: what I built and what they shipped, and how the pieces fit together into something a lot like OpenClaw.
I built a Go Bubble Tea starter for local model servers, used Gemma 4 through llama.cpp, and split the TUI into llocal.
I'd been seeing chatter about Hermes Agent from Nous Research, so I installed it locally and put it to work on this blog. Notes on the pitch, the SOUL.md system, and what it actually felt like to use.
A practical explainer for both developers and everyday Claude users: what prompt caching is, what gets reused, what breaks it, and how to make long sessions cheaper and faster.
A simple set of habits I use to keep long AI coding sessions from getting bloated: better one-shot prompts, matching model and thinking level to the job, understanding cache behavior, and using cheaper orchestrators when it makes sense.
A fennel-forward Italian spice blend that turns any ground meat into proper sausage
I reverse engineered several of my own sites into DESIGN.md files to see how much of a design system can actually be described, and why writing down design intent might be more reusable than it looks.
A practical tour of Claude Code flags that are easy to miss but genuinely useful once you move past the default interactive loop.
A bright, high-impact rice finished with garlic, lots of cilantro, and fresh lime juice added after cooking.
Anthropic shutting down OAuth-based Claude Code access forced my hand. Here's how I moved OpenClaw to OpenAI Codex, why Codex makes more sense inside a real agent harness than it did on its own, and why brainpack changes the switching cost.
The Y Combinator CEO open-sourced his entire Claude Code workflow. Here are the 10 skills worth knowing — including why office-hours should be the first thing you run on any new idea.
I tested Anthropic's official Claude plugins for knowledge workers. Here are the 10 that deliver the most value for PMs, engineers, sales teams, and operators.
I used Gemini to write a Loooom skill, installed it in Claude Code, and got a full audio analysis report on a 37-second piano recording of Espresso. Turns out AIs teaching AIs new senses is a surprisingly powerful pattern.
I rebuilt the beatbrain backend in an afternoon. Parallel fetching, Firestore caching, and a podcast discovery engine that indexes 100+ categories. Here's the whole story.
I built a Japanese learning site in a morning because I wanted something I could pull up on my phone and just look at characters. Here's how Gemini wrote the prompt and magerbot built the whole thing.
Dogfooding Karpathy's autoresearch pattern on my own skill marketplace. How I'm using evals and tight feedback loops to make the learn-anything skill measurably better.
Claude Code's new channels feature lets you push messages from Telegram and Discord into a running session. Here's how it works, why mobile access changes everything, and how I'd wire it into my projects.
Everyone's talking about building a software factory. Here's where the term came from and how engineers can start thinking about building one.
12 hours before my bracket was due, I used Gemma-3-27b to generate unique insights for all 32 first-round games. Here's what the AI found — and what it got wrong.
4lb corned beef, mini carrots, cabbage, potatoes — braised low and slow in a covered Dutch oven. The St. Patrick's Day comfort food move.
LangChain just dropped Open SWE — an open-source framework for building internal coding agents like Stripe's Minions, Ramp's Inspect, and Coinbase's Cloudbot. Here's what it is, how it works, and how to customize it.