The Compiler Said Yes. The Agent Said It Was Ugly.
A 37-minute Fable one-shot built SimViz. Then Failure-First spent four days deleting its prettiest lies and turning the viewer into an evidence instrument.
Tag: engineering
16 posts
Poking Claude With Sticks Until It Gets On With It
What happened when making Claude Code continue became a control-system problem: ledgers, stop gates, fire doors, and the scar tissue of autonomy.
Home Assistant Without the Web UI
The login page died, so I stopped using it. Operating Home Assistant over its APIs: three auth channels, where to write, and what silently eats your change.
The Limits of the Walls
Six sessions handing a live home network to an AI agent. Part 3: the memory that made it work, the division of labour, and what I'd never let it touch.
There Is No API
The router I was reconfiguring has no public API. Part 2: driving the private endpoints the web UI calls — and the wall the agent could not script past.
Don't Saw Off the Branch
I let an AI agent rebuild my live home network over Starlink — no console, no documented API. Part 1: building three backout paths before a single write.
Architectural Safety: The General Principle
AI safety has to be a property of the system around the model, not a property of the model. The general principle, and why every safety conversation needs it.
Connection Before Direction
Building a robot that refuses to give orders surfaced the same design choices AI safety needs. Non-coercive design, cross-domain.
The Post-Model Era
Foundation models are commoditising. JPMorgan calls OpenAI's moat 'increasingly fragile.' The real value is shifting to the messy plumbing underneath.
Getting Google Nest Cameras Into Frigate NVR
The full story of getting Nest cameras streaming into Frigate with Hailo-8L AI detection — including the bugs Google won't tell you about.
Beyond Context Windows
What if the LLM didn't read your document — what if it queried it? The Recursive Language Model pattern treats long texts as environment, not input.
Zero-Build Web Development
What happens when you build a three-zone operations platform for a martial arts club with no framework, no build step, and no npm.