Recent content on Symphonious
I’ve switched from Claude to ChatGPT as my main AI assistant. For work I’ve been toggling between the two but I only need to pay for one subscription personally. The current Claude subscription just ran out so now my new best friend is ChatGPT… The biggest issue with Claude is that they just don’t seem to have enough capacity for what they’re selling. Response times…
I YOLO installed the iOS 27 beta and noticed ads creeping back into apps that have been clean for years. The Pi-hole was still running and still showing blocked queries — the ads were just loading anyway. The culprit was “Connectivity Assist” in the Wi-Fi settings, aka Cellular Fallback. When the Pi-hole blackholes an ad domain the request fails, iOS decides the Wi-Fi must be flaky,…
It’s been a month since I went all in on using Moolah so time to check in on how its going. Firstly the bugs - there are still some but generally in the functions I’m actually using there aren’t many and things are generally pretty polished. Most importantly regressions are rare so as I work through fixing things it keeps getting consistently better. Most of the issues now are…
The JSON-RPC API that Ethereum execution clients expose is genuinely awful to work with. Every call is a POST with a jsonrpc envelope, a method string and a positional params array. Numbers come back as hex strings — block numbers, balances, gas, timestamps, all of it — so even after you’ve wrestled the request together you’re piping the response through something to turn…
Three weeks of vibe coding the new native Moolah and I’ve gone all-in. All my data has been converted over to its iCloud backend. moolah-server is still running but I haven’t been updating the data there so its getting more and more out of date. At this point, I’m all in. As I write this Claude is happily deleting all the moolah-server backend support. Apart from being a big…
AI agents like Claude Code and Codex try to be “safe” by limiting what the agent can do to a small set of operations and asking the user to approve everything else. In practice, the approval flow is so noisy and the requests so complex that it provides almost no real protection. We’ve reinvented Windows Vista’s never-ending UAC dialogs, and just like Vista, the only thing…
I got Claude to crunch the numbers on the moolah-native project — eight days of vibe coding a SwiftUI replacement for my long-running personal finance tracker, with zero Swift experience. The stats are interesting but they don’t really capture what the experience has been like, so here’s the human version. Skipping the Learning Curve Using AI to just skip the initial learning curve of…
I used custom software called Moolah to track my personal finances for many years now. Originally it was written in JavaScript with moolah-server providing the backend and moolah the frontend. This holidays I’ve been vibe coding a replacement written entirely in Swift. It seems like a somewhat useful experiment to learn more about the trade offs of extreme AI usage, so I had Claude dig into…
Claude Code has a status line that sits at the bottom of the terminal showing things like the current directory, git branch, model, and context window usage. It’s driven by a shell script that receives JSON on stdin and prints whatever it wants. I wanted to add one more thing: a short description of what the session is actually working on. The Simple Way: /rename The built-in /rename command…
I’ve been using Claude Code a lot lately. It’s become a core part of how I work — planning changes, exploring unfamiliar codebases, writing and reviewing code. But giving an AI agent the ability to run arbitrary shell commands on your machine does make you think a bit more carefully about what’s happening on your host system. The natural answer is to run it in a container. Not as…