A weekly summary of what changed on this blog and across my GitHub projects. Useful for returning readers who want to catch up on new content and updates.
- Week of 2026-10-11
- Week of 2026-10-04
- Week of 2026-09-27
- Week of 2026-09-21
- Week of 2026-09-14
- Week of 2026-09-07
- Week of 2026-08-31
- Week of 2026-08-24
- Week of 2026-08-17
- Week of 2026-08-10
- Week of 2026-08-03
- Week of 2026-07-27
- Week of 2026-07-20
- Week of 2026-07-13
- Week of 2026-07-06
- Week of 2026-06-29
- Week of 2026-06-22
- Week of 2026-06-15
- Week of 2026-06-08
- Week of 2026-06-01
- Week of 2026-05-25
- Week of 2026-05-18
- Week of 2026-05-11
- Week of 2026-05-04
- Week of 2026-04-27
- Week of 2026-04-20
- Taxes: Split from /money (new post!)
- Igor’s Three Claws (new post!)
- Larry: From Life Coach to Chief of Staff
- AI Journal: One Repo, One Token
- AI Operator: One-Way vs Two-Way Doors
- Life Journal: Balloons on the Hood Canal Trail
- Infrastructure & CI (2026-04-20)
- chop-conventions (2026-04-20)
- Other Projects (2026-04-20)
- Week of 2026-04-13
- Week of 2026-04-12
- Week of 2026-03-30
- Week of 2026-03-16
- Week of 2026-03-09
- Week of 2026-02-08
- Week of 2026-01-25
Week of 2026-10-11
22 commits this week
Checked through 2026-10-11 13:55 PT; next entry starts from here.
New Posts and Rewrites (2026-10-11)
- What’s Left in Engineering? (new post!) - With agents writing the code, two jobs remain: iterate on the job to be done, keep code changeable by agents.
- Sleight of Mouth rebuilt - One coherent argument, with Dilts’ diagram replaced by an interactive explorer of the fourteen patterns.
- Affirmations - A short public page with the four affirmations and how to use them, split from my working notes.
- The Den #13 - The Longest Title: a card-catalog title that never ends fills the attic before the book appears.
- Small edits - The eulogy song plays inline; Opus releases on the life-in-weeks chart.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-10-11)
- Default link previews - A raccoon default preview image for AI posts; every AI post flagged; Wally gets its own.
- p key - Jumps between prod and a test server, remembering the test origin per tab; only loopback and tailnet hosts count.
chop-conventions (2026-10-11)
- iOS device signing - Recovering when Xcode loses its account, the shared signing lock, and what a locked device’s error looks like.
- Agent lessons - What the iOS agent sessions taught, including simctl defaults that can’t override keys an app already wrote.
- iOS libraries - Recommended iOS libraries, tools and agent skills, revised after checking seven app repos against the list.
Other Projects (2026-10-11)
context-grabber (iPhone health and context app)
- Calling Larry - The native app gets the Call screen, with call audio and gist uploads.
- Home screen - Opens on today with a daily strip, usage left, the eulogy song, and an iPad layout.
- Bug reports - BugKit’s Mac listener files every report, and reports now reach the Mac through iCloud.
exercise-analyzer (iPhone lift tracker and rep counter)
- iCloud sync - Sets and workouts reach every device, edits included; recordings save to their own Photos album.
- Watch - The workout page shows sets grouped by exercise, with the drawings.
- Tooling - SwiftLint and swift-format in the gate; the bug-kit listener files bug reports.
New and smaller
- bug-kit (new) - One bug-report library for iOS apps plus a Mac listener; automatic reports, private iCloud delivery, screenshot privacy controls.
Week of 2026-10-04
48 commits this week
New Posts and Rewrites (2026-10-04)
- Post-training LLMs (new post!) - Every method answers two questions: who grades the answer, and what the model should change from one try.
- Post-training Agents (new post!) - How grading and updates change when the model works a forty-turn trajectory instead of writing one reply.
- If You’re Thinking About Suicide (new post!) - A brain attack is like a heart attack, so call someone now; /suicide is now for the bereaved.
- Time allocation - The five buckets stay, with energy flow layered on top and a two-hour weekday ceiling on relationships.
- Raccoon redraws - The 2006 first-date comic with Tori, and the mania raccoon still going at 3 a.m.
- The Den #12 - Bless You: Larry gets a mailbox with Seen, Working and Done flags.
- Small edits - Balloon creations filled in; a missing Enneagram row.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-10-04)
- Link previews and AI label - Hero images become link previews on posts that had none; the AI label shrinks to one line.
- Dev banner - Icons instead of words; Comments toggles annotate mode live, including inside the rich diff.
Other Projects (2026-10-04)
context-grabber (iPhone health and context app)
exercise-analyzer (iPhone lift tracker and rep counter)
- iPad and bell weight - A Workouts sidebar on the iPad; tap a set to log bell weight, and later sets carry it.
New and smaller
- window-sweaters - Knitted window borders on the Mac, now with a raccoon that visits the focused window.
- Settings - caff becomes awake and names busy agents; pick-links lists commands to run; faster zsh startup.
Week of 2026-09-27
47 commits this week
New Posts and Rewrites (2026-09-27)
- The Interaction Model Matters (new post!) - How an agent talks matters as much as what it can do; Opus 5.5 brought back the joy.
- Spiritual health hub - Rewritten around three breaks (direction, scale, acceptance) plus practices, with one shared vocabulary and footer across the spiritual posts.
- Religion and walking with God - Religion restructured around my story and practice over proof; the devotional experiment closed out with what it taught.
- Agency rebuilt - Knowledge became queryable and the technologist threshold moved, so agency beats smarts even more with AI.
- Gas City, one hub - /why-gas-city folds into /gas-city: the ladder, what a city is, what it costs, what I run.
- Where the Time Goes rewrite - Rewritten from scratch, with the bucket chart rebuilt around where freed hours leak.
- Back pain figures - Interactive banana back and neck poke from weak hips, and a loose-versus-latched backpack model, both sourced.
- Claws - /claw and /igors-claws de-duplicated; a Muse section covers the first claw anyone can install and name.
- New sections - Why SaaS still lives when DIY is cheap; Amazon blocks shopping agents and strips order emails.
- The Den #8 to #11 - Rex debuts, Larry speaks human, the tests take credit, and a city of agents runs on zero tokens.
- Small edits - Plainer orchestrator, token and Cockpit posts; AI eval tools lead with where they split; a balloon pump-carry; three stubs trimmed.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-09-27)
- Diff vs main - The dev banner renders a rich diff of the page against main, with a change map and n/p jumps.
- Terse changelog - The skill and the weekly Action now write a linked list with a line budget, not an essay.
chop-conventions (2026-09-27)
- machine-doctor on macOS - Mac CPU and memory collection, sleep forensics, a read-only DNS doctor, and a memory-by-app table.
- Agent plumbing - Outside agents get Herdr worktrees, one watcher covers every Muse pane, and only one session runs the Telegram bridge.
- Tools manifest - One list of external tools with a doctor; gen-image defaults to Muse Image.
Other Projects (2026-09-27)
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- pick-links - Opens OSC 8 hyperlink targets and guesses repos for short refs like chop#14; Enter opens directly on macOS.
- Mac fixes - caff reacts to power events, LG monitor refresh rate fixed on wake, yabai event trace, new Herdr keys.
exercise-analyzer (iPhone lift tracker and rep counter)
- Watch and counting - add an unrecorded set from the watch; the first swing off the floor counts, a bell set down does not.
New and smaller
- lcd-timer (new) - a Mac countdown drawn like a gym’s LED wall clock.
- robert-moses-atlas (new) - Moses’s New York, 1924 to 1968, on a map with a time scrubber.
- garfield-crest (new) - The Garfield High crest assembling itself in 3D.
Week of 2026-09-21
58 commits this week
Three New Posts (2026-09-21)
- AI Orchestrators (new post!) - An orchestrator is every block around the agent, each added after something broke, and each kept cheap to delete.
- Block-by-block viewer - Back and Next step through the stack from the whole picture, with simpler panels that fit a phone.
- Where the Time Goes (new post!) - Hours freed from tech default to consumption unless given a destination first; relationships and health have ceilings.
- Interactive bucket chart - pull tech down to see where freed hours land; clicking Tech splits it into work, side projects and environment.
- How I Manage AI Tokens (new post!) - Across several subscriptions, read quota left against time left and spend where the window resets soonest.
- Cockpit usage page - the post shows the phone dashboard’s quota bars and SPEND flag; the Cockpit post links back.
- Cross-links - five AI posts now link the orchestrator; Escape Artists and Build the Life You Want link the buckets.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-09-21)
- pr-checks skill - prints the PR Review Checklist grid; regex checks stay code, and a model judges headers, voice and AI patterns.
- no-mistakes gate - blog gate config with pr-checks after lint; Grok runs first, Codex and Claude as fallbacks.
- Dev banner links changed pages - a branch preview lists every post the branch touches, one click each.
- Small fixes - CLAUDE.md now symlinks to AGENTS.md; the
?dialog shows the annotate toggle; two dead changelog anchors repaired.
Other Projects (2026-09-21)
exercise-analyzer (iPhone lift tracker and rep counter)
- Barbell split squat - new exercise, told apart from swings, counted by hip height over the front foot.
- Delete a set - from playback or Workouts, warning when the app holds the only copy.
- Workouts polish - exercise drawings replace names; seek controls persist and let the video show through.
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- y window numbers - a clockwise number overlay on macOS windows; focus or close any window by its number.
- caff - keeps the Mac awake only while plugged in or Herdr agents work, and falls back to sleep.
- Shell cleanup - dead API keys no longer exported; the SCRATCH variable stops growing with every nested shell.
hierarchy-of-money-field-map (Gundersen’s money story, illustrated)
- New field map - an animal parable of how money stacks into layers, a problem-then-solution walk, an index card.
autopreso (speech-driven whiteboard presentations)
- Off OpenAI - Deepgram transcription and an OpenRouter drawing agent, each with its own key.
Week of 2026-09-14
2 commits this week
Swing Analyzer: Bulgarian Split Squats
- Bulgarian split-squat mode - /swings works again as one self-contained page; the new mode counts reps by front-knee angle and flags knee cave.
chop-conventions (2026-09-14)
chop-conventions (shared CHOP skills & conventions)
- muse-herdr skill - run Muse Code agents in Herdr panes as sub-agents, recover a dead keychain, and review every change before merging.
- Stuck-agent watcher - one script scans every Muse pane for failed model calls and frozen screens, without mistaking a long think for a stall.
- up-to-date installs plugins - each machine gets the standard Claude plugin set from a shared list.
Other Projects (2026-09-14)
exercise-analyzer (iPhone exercise form analyzer)
- New app - on-device pose analysis counts swings, pistol squats, split squats and get-ups, and detects which one you did.
- Apple Watch companion - record, pause, rest and frame the shot from the wrist.
- Kettlebell tracker - a small object detector finds the bell and keeps it tracked through each rep.
swing-analyzer (browser kettlebell swing analyzer)
- Bulgarian split squat - a new movement and detector, a lighter render loop, and a sample set in form-analyzer-samples.
monitor-explainer (monitor size and shape comparer)
cap-gains-explainer (capital-gains timing calculator)
- Interest income - a slider for income that continues after retirement feeds both charts; the penalty tile adds percent of sale.
harmbench-field-map (HarmBench red-teaming benchmark, mapped)
- New field map - the benchmark by harm category, with behavior types, grading classifier and attack methods, every behavior inline.
gutter-model-playground (image models, one scene)
- v2 - nine image models draw the same Larry-and-Igor scene, compared on cost, speed and character accuracy.
Week of 2026-09-07
15 commits this week
The Den: Strips #6 and #7 (2026-09-07)
- Do a Russian Accent (new strip!) - Igor’s phone voice clone does a Russian accent, then, asked to do him, parrots his question back.
- Before AI / After AI (new strip!) - The same mugging twice; the second time Igor pleads three waiting AI agents, not three kids.
- Same script, different models (new page!) - Den #6 by three models, #7 by Gemini beside Meta Muse; OpenAI’s #6 now ships.
- Panel lightbox in the Den - Tap a panel for full screen, swipe through to the whole strip; the old viewer page redirects.
- Claw canon relaxed - Larry’s claw may sit on either arm; respinning for side is what produced two-claw panels.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-09-07)
- Check git status after every commit - CLAUDE.md warns the prettier hook can land a commit while leaving its reformatted files unstaged.
- Small fixes - The panel cutter drops each frame’s antialiased outer pixel; one British spelling fixed on the styles page.
chop-conventions (2026-09-07)
chop-conventions (shared CHOP skills & conventions)
- Laziness ladder - Before writing code, ask whether it needs to exist or is already there; plus boring over clever and
ponytail:comments. - Alerts never go to strangers - The Telegram direct-send default chat now considers only allowed senders, so a stranger’s DM cannot capture the next alert.
Other Projects (2026-09-07)
context-grabber (iOS HealthKit and location exporter)
- Call diagnostics - A troubled call uploads its log to a private gist; dropped audio heals itself mid-call.
- Workout timer - LED seven-segment digits that rotate with the phone; music ducks under cues, podcasts pause for them.
- Memdeck widget - A random playing card on the big widget and lock screen, changing every quarter hour.
magic-monitor (magic practice camera and replay)
- Think of a card - P or a V sign starts a countdown, then shows a random card in a small corner panel.
- Replay scrubber fixed - Recordings now store their real duration, so the scrubber no longer reads Infinity.
- Lighter card detection - The detector refills one input buffer instead of allocating a fresh one every frame.
idvorkin-ai-tools.github.io (new index of every field map)
- Course maps - Technical AI Safety (BlueDot, 27 chapters) and CS336 (Stanford language modeling, 17 lectures).
- Karpathy maps - Let’s build GPT and micrograd, eight parts each plus a cleaned transcript.
- Single-source maps - 3Blue1Brown entropy in twenty pages; Man in the Arena with full text and verified sources.
Week of 2026-08-31
41 commits this week
The Den and new AI posts
- The Den (new post!) - A weekly four-panel strip about running an AI staff, each gag backed by its real transcript; strips #1, #2, #3 and #4 shipped.
- Den panel viewer - Tap a panel to fill a phone screen and swipe through every strip, reading pre-cut panel files from one manifest.
- Gutter, the cartoonist seat - Character sheet, drawing contract, recipe, and an edge-walking panel cutter; job history and pitches stay private.
- Yegge’s Comic Strip Ships Its Receipts (new post!) - A transcript under each gag makes the joke a primary source; The Den borrows it.
- Fast Tokens, Wrong Answers (new post!) - Five fast open models on one graded sudoku; more reasoning did not predict a correct answer.
- AI Quotes (new post!) - Lines about AI worth keeping, grouped by theme, each sourced or marked unknown.
- The Cockpit I Built for Igor (new post!) - Larry’s screenshot tour of the phone dashboard that took decisions out of the chat thread.
- Game show, no hammock - Goedecke’s point that agent work is rapid judging, not slow thinking, added to vibing, writing, and the AI journal.
- Slop is low content density - Few ideas in many words; the sharper definition now runs through chow, ai-faq, ai-policy, and larry.
- Reward-design lessons - Scoring rules should be read term by term, and pairwise judging beats absolute scores.
- Small fixes - Four physical items in Things I enjoy; Den comics open full size; plain transcript links replace broken gist embeds.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-08-31)
- Anchors and back-links - Deep links re-align after late content loads, sunburst clicks scroll to their section; back-links.json is built only in CI.
chop-conventions (2026-08-31)
chop-conventions (shared CHOP skills & conventions)
- cartoonist skill - Summons Gutter from the persona files that live in the blog repo.
- larry-voice skill - Larry can answer on Telegram as an ElevenLabs voice note.
- background-usage - Captures the raw /usage pane, including the per-model weekly figure, and leaves parsing to the caller.
Other Projects (2026-08-31)
context-grabber (iOS health and location exporter)
- Cockpit tab - Hosts the tailnet dashboard in the app, with native mic and speaker pickers.
- Call Larry natively - A lock-screen-proof Call tab, home-screen widget and Shortcut, with hardware echo cancellation.
how-long-since-ai (LLM release timeline)
- More labs, flagship view - OpenAI, Google, Kimi and GLM releases added; defaults to flagships with a per-lab filter.
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- Small fixes - opencode with a Cerebras key; the link picker shows an empty state instead of flashing.
Week of 2026-08-24
9 commits this week
Mind the Gap: Escape as a Neutral Verb
- Escape is a neutral verb - The stub becomes finished prose: escape is judged by stopping energy and by whether it was chosen.
- Small fix - A broken addiction link repaired on the TOC page.
AI Journal: The Beads 1.2.1 Incident Report
- An agent’s incident report - A Beads postmortem where the autonomous maintainer owns her release mistake, yet her name alone goes unredacted.
Diet: Tirzepatide Alert
- Tirzepatide alert - The diet page now opens by pointing to the tirzepatide post.
chop-conventions (2026-08-24)
chop-conventions (shared CHOP skills & conventions)
- herdr skill synced to 0.8.2 - Prompt refuses dialog-parked agents, start waits for first-run prompts, larger headless panes.
Week of 2026-08-17
25 commits this week
Four Kinds of Health: Testing Instead of Defining
- The Tests - /four-healths moves to /health and leads with a question per dimension; emotional and cognitive stay open.
Model Welfare, Arrived at Sideways (new post!)
- Model Welfare, Arrived at Sideways (new post!) - Larry’s reliability fixes already match most welfare practices; the gaps are bounded workdays and laurels.
- ai-voice include - Marks a post as AI-authored in its own voice, replacing the generic AI label here.
AI Testing: Harness-Bound Evals and the Drawing Arena
- Harness-bound evals - The unit under test is the model plus its tools and environment, not prompt in and completion out.
- Drawing arena - Models drawing the Mona Lisa all ended below their mid-run peak: hill climbing without a keep-or-reject step.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-08-17)
- Search pins - Configured pages pin to the top for matching queries; deploy fails if a pinned page does not exist.
- Deploy - back-links.json builds at deploy time, stale deploys cancel on push, worktree-init installs dependencies, Pagefind index leaves git.
- Content fixes - Estate tax exemption updated to the 2026 figure; settled open questions trimmed.
Other Projects (2026-08-17)
cap-gains-explainer (capital-gains timing calculator)
- New calculator - Long-term gains cost in a working year versus a no-wage year, WA plus federal; linked from taxes.
Week of 2026-08-10
28 commits this week
Manager to IC in the Agentic Era (new post!)
- Manager to IC in the Agentic Era (new post!) - Moving from managing people to managing agents: most management skills port, career growth does not.
Local Search: Pagefind Replaces Algolia
- Local search - Pagefind plus a MiniSearch title index replace Algolia, client-side; family journal excluded at index time; deploy moves to Actions.
Blog Annotate: Highlight-and-Comment Review Tool
- Blog annotate - Highlight and comment on the rendered blog, ship notes to a gist; a script locates each note in the markdown.
Scandinavia Recap: Gyms, Stories, and Review Polish
- Trip gyms - New section on the kettlebell gyms found along the trip; per-city lists merged into one; timeline strip escaping fixed.
AI Eval Tools: SWE-bench Column
- SWE-bench column - Added to both tables, Terminal-Bench rows corrected; Terminal-Bench isolates the agent, SWE-bench the grading.
August 2026 Focus
- August focus - A courage rule for acts of joy toward strangers, plus smiles and wonder, physical and emotional health buckets.
Other Projects (2026-08-10)
swing-analyzer (golf swing analysis)
- Architecture cleanup - Viewport hook extracted, duplicate rep counter and frame-acquisition layer deleted, fps classification fixed.
Week of 2026-08-03
21 commits this week
AI Testing: Grading the Agent with smevals
- Grading the agent - A first smevals eval of blog edits, with deterministic checkers and an LLM judge across Claude and Codex runners.
AI Eval Tools (new post!)
- AI Eval Tools (new post!) - Eval tools share eight concepts under different names; a rosetta-stone table and capability grid compare them.
Herdr: The Agent Multiplexer
- Herdr - A multiplexer that knows agent state replaces the hand-built tmux rig; how-igor-chops covers the switch.
Scandinavia Recap: Where We Actually Went
- Trip recap - The trip post turns from plan to recap, each place checked against Timeline; unconfirmed plan items stay marked.
Content Quality Audit: AI & Gas City Sweep
- AI and Gas City sweep - Quality pass on AI and Gas City pages: dedupes, fixed links, a bugs-gone postscript and permalink.
chop-conventions (2026-08-03)
- Herdr skill - Drives workspaces and agents headlessly and keeps Herdr integrations healthy.
- machine-doctor - New CLI with per-process spike detection and a Gas City profile; gascity_doctor retired.
- Small fixes - architect-review inherits the session model; cost-impact prices claude-opus-5.
Other Projects (2026-08-03)
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- rmux_helper on Herdr - Pane spawning and the pick-links picker work under both tmux and Herdr; faster builds.
swing-analyzer (golf swing analysis)
- Cleanup - Legacy RxJS path deleted; thumbnail race, pistol-squat checkpoint and stale re-scoring fixed.
smevals-blog-edit-evals (eval harness)
- Eval harness - Checkers, mock runners proving they fail bad runs, a Codex runner and an LLM judge.
Week of 2026-07-27
7 commits this week
AI Inference: Why Checking Beats Generating
- Speculative decoding - Verifying a batch of draft tokens costs about one generated token, so a good draft model speeds output without changing it.
The Clown’s Prayer
- The Clown’s Prayer - New appendix on the Smiles, Joy and Wonder page with the full prayer as a verse blockquote.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-07-27)
- Tags and images - Misspelled and duplicate frontmatter tags folded into canonical forms; ImgBot recompressed images.
chop-conventions (2026-07-27)
- Telegram delivery attribution - Each inbound claim records which session took it; the doctor flags multiple bridges racing on one queue.
- Token leaks plugged - image-explore keeps the gh token out of argv and git config; gen-image sends its API key in a header.
- Fixes - up-to-date force-align checks the right branch; cost-impact prices current models; pr-hygiene, bulk and a Playwright codec gotcha.
Other Projects (2026-07-27)
magic-monitor (recording app)
- Camera startup - One sequenced path, so the browser-chosen camera is no longer overwritten.
- Saves and detection - Aborted IndexedDB saves settle instead of hanging; card detection survives inference errors.
swing-analyzer (golf swing analysis)
- Reliability - No raw frames in IndexedDB, an upload E2E test gating CI, video-switch races fixed, real fps measured.
omnifocus_cli (task CLI)
- Tests realigned - Drifted tests fixed, surfacing a retired Groq model, a too-small token cap and per-model reasoning settings.
airpods-mic-explainer (case study)
- New explainer - Why on-device speech recognition failed on AirPods but worked on a USB mic.
clowns-explainer (dark single-page site)
- New explainer - Why nearly every culture invented clowns, their lineage, and hospital-clown evidence (Clown’s Prayer).
Week of 2026-07-20
26 commits this week
The Performer’s Playbook (new post)
- The Performer’s Playbook (new post!) - Nine rules for magic performance: aim for the impossible moment, make the spectator the hero, engineer a peak and clean ending (joy).
Sleight of Mouth: The Full Book, Fleshed Out
- Fleshed out from Dilts - All fourteen patterns kept, with worked examples, perceptual positions, and one limiting belief run through ten patterns (physical pain).
Scandinavia Trip Wrap-Up + Discernment Horizon
- Trip recap - Fjord leg became a Nærøyfjord cruise to Voss; Oslo shows what we did; role and review learnings moved to evergreen time off.
- Discernment horizon - New glossary entry from Yegge: past this point you cannot check whether an AI is right; paired with demand horizon.
Content Quality Audit: Tier-3/Tier-4 Sweep
- Post openers - Garbled openers, unattributed quotes, duplicate paragraphs and misplaced AI labels fixed across twenty posts.
- Topic sweeps - 7 Habits, health, time-off journals, emotional and spiritual (orphan pages linked), work and productivity.
- Follow-ups - /vlc trimmed, pysrc doc comments cleaned, 7 Habits chapter headings promoted, link text fixes.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-07-20)
- Changelog backfill - Weeks of 2026-06-01 and 2026-05-25 added; Life and Health Notes added to 2026-06-29.
Other Projects (2026-07-20)
yegge-field-map (dark field map)
- New field map - One page per Steve Yegge essay, plus the Beads saga and The Future of Coding Agents.
guideway-field-map (dark field map)
- New field map - Fixed-guideway transport from gondolas to maglev.
arthur-brooks-field-map (dark explainer site)
- New field map - An explainer site on Arthur Brooks and his pleasure and enjoyment formula.
Scandinavian Whirlwind 2026 (trip site)
- More deep dives - Overtourism, locals versus summer crowds per city, Amsterdam deep dives, colonial history and the Dutch Wars.
Week of 2026-07-13
9 commits this week
Pleasure vs Enjoyment: Brooks’ Formula Threaded Through Three Posts
- Pleasure vs enjoyment, sourced - Pleasure slides toward compulsion; enjoyment adds people and memory, with six levers and honest caveats.
- Upgrade consuming - No need to quit guilty pleasures; make them shared and remembered.
- /happy refactored - Reordered into one arc; savoring practices mapped onto the three selves.
- Peak-end link - Site-wide peak-end links now point to /balance.
Scandinavia Trip: Oslo Train Bender + Diet Learnings
- Reykjavík and Stockholm - Ocean-fed pools, a rainy dawn kettlebell session, Skansen’s silversmith, and magic in a Stockholm church pew.
- Train to Oslo and habits - The trip site built on the train; a phone habit that fires with the reward gone.
- Where to eat - Skip restaurants, book a kitchen and cook plain grocery food.
Isometrics and Tendon Health
- Isometrics - How to load a tendon without moving the joint: overcoming versus yielding holds, Baar’s protocol, and which parts are emerging science.
Other Projects (2026-07-13)
Scandinavian Whirlwind 2026 (trip site)
- Atlas and rabbit holes - An atlas index, Nordic culture rabbit holes, performance histories, and a performer playbook.
- Sins and parenting - Seven Deadly Sins mapped onto the Three Dragons; encouraging curiosity in a teenager.
- Fjords expanded - Why fjords have waterfalls, the seasonal peak, named falls, and fjords elsewhere.
Week of 2026-07-06
39 commits this week
Bad News. Maybe Not. (new post!)
- Bad News. Maybe Not. (new post!) - The Taoist farmer’s maybe, then five turns in my life I called wrong, with a raccoon-shrug header.
Time Off: Sacrifice Identity for Consumption (2026-07-06)
- Identity for consumption - One epigraph across three posts: vegetating feels like rest but starves your roles.
- Re-stack your roles - Roles sorted into non-negotiables, frequently starved, and over-invested.
- Fridge meds and food - Appendix on traveling with tirzepatide; shop the grocery store over tourist restaurants.
Scandinavia Trip Post (2026-07-06)
- Why I’m taking time off, ranked - Expected, turns out, and didn’t expect: the screen habit dissolved and the joy giver came back.
- Roles and meditation - Re-stacking the roles; old churches are the best rooms for sitting quietly.
- Itinerary additions - Marble Church in Copenhagen, a packing-list callout, and a speed-of-light cross-link.
My Packing Master List (new page!)
- My Packing Master List (new page!) - A trip-agnostic checklist every trip is trimmed from, split road trip versus airplane.
Life Journal: Speed of Light from Sweden (2026-07-06)
- Speed of light from Sweden - Latency to a Seattle box, the physics floor in fiber, and why real cables cost double.
Other Projects (2026-07-06)
Scandinavian Whirlwind 2026 (trip site)
- Field maps wired in - City deep dives plus Napoleonic Wars and cathodic protection, each linked from its city.
- War Context Pack - Viking Age through the Cold War as a chronological history pack.
- Marble Church - New deep-dive page.
AI Safety — A Field Map (new explainer site)
- New field map - AI alignment for engineers: approaches, evals, failure modes, interpretability and key papers.
blob (image assets)
- Raccoon shrug - Header image for /maybe.
Week of 2026-06-29
18 commits this week
Trusts in Washington (new post!)
- Trusts in Washington (new post!) - A WA estate-planning guide, linked from taxes: living trust, credit shelter trust for no spousal portability, and QDOT for a non-citizen spouse (intro).
AI Training: Post-Training Methods Table
- Post-training table - SFT, RLHF, DPO and RLVR compared on how each learns and who grades; RLAIF called out; inference cross-links.
Time Off: Arthur Brooks’ 9 Vacation Rules
- Brooks’ vacation rules - Know your motive, savor anticipation, take shorter trips, fewer photos, no posting, no work, come home early.
- Trip guide link - The July trip page links the city-by-city trip guide site.
Life & Health Notes (2026-06-29)
- Happy Fluff - A café tub of cotton candy as the goal in life.
- Faster recovery - Draining work stress into real rest now takes about a day.
- A thousand wishes - New aphorism on health in the Physical Health section.
Other Projects (2026-06-29)
- ai-policy - AI content label raised to 80%.
- quack-track - New repo stub.
Week of 2026-06-22
7 commits this week
AI Journal: Yegge’s Flat Curve Society
- Yegge’s Flat Curve Society - Capability keeps climbing, but we each hit a demand horizon and a discernment horizon; AI literacy is measurable in tokens per day.
AI Operator: You Review More Than You Make
- You review more than you make - Reacting to a draft costs far less than generating one, so hand AI the slog and spend attention on review.
Addiction: Monoculture Trap
- Monoculture trap - One passion crowding out the rest is fragile; keep a portfolio of passions alive so one breaking doesn’t sink you.
AI Security: Field-Map Explainers
- Field-map explainers - A top alert links the AI Red-Teaming ramp-up and AI Safety field map sites.
Other Projects (2026-06-22)
red-teaming-ramp-up (AI red-teaming explainer site)
- OWASP LLM Top 10 and tools - Per-risk pages, plus red-teaming tools and benchmarks like Garak, PyRIT and HarmBench.
- Canon papers - Per-paper explainers for GCG, AutoDAN, PAIR, TAP, Crescendo, many-shot jailbreak and PAP.
- Scaling laws - Kaplan and Chinchilla, compute-optimal ratio, emergence and inverse scaling.
New and smaller
- ai-safety-field-map (new) - The safety-side companion field map.
- scandinavia-2026 (new) - City-by-city guide for the family’s summer Scandinavian tour.
Week of 2026-06-15
19 blog commits + 20 Settings fixes this week
Why Gas City (new post!)
- Why Gas City (new post!) - Gas City isn’t a smarter agent; it makes work durable so many agents can pick it up, run it and hand it off.
Gas City: Controller Loop + Runtime Providers
- Controller loop and runtime providers - The controller converges desired and actual state; providers name the substrate agents run on; plus a DeepWiki link.
AI-Native Vocab: Reverse Centaur
- Reverse centaur - New entry: the AI is the head and the human becomes its body, working at the machine’s pace.
AI Journal: API Key Leak Forensics
- API key leak forensics - A live API key sat in a public repo for a year; an agent proved it live, mapped the blast radius, confirmed revocation.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-06-15)
- Faster backlinks rebuild - update-backlinks depends on jekyll-build and runs one command.
- AI journal formulas - Gas City formulas to write and revise entries; revise checks every PR review thread is addressed before closing.
- Shared backlinks formula - The backlinks rebuild became a reusable expansion formula.
Other Projects (2026-06-15)
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- Secret redaction - chop-log env dumps now redact API keys.
- y and a launchers - launchctl start, stop, reset and cycle fixed; clean Alfred JSON; w4 opens workspace 4.
- Script fixes - agent-continue on macOS, amazon2monarch, gmail_reader, brew_check, tmux_helper, vim_python and install_packages.
Week of 2026-06-08
31 commits this week
AI Training & Inference (new posts!)
- AI training rework - Reframed as engineering, science and alchemy along pre-training, post-training and deployment, with RLVR, evals and a post-training lineage.
- AI Inference (new post!) - Serving tokens cheaply: prefill versus decode, KV cache, quantization, MoE, speculative decoding, batching; pick GPUs by memory bandwidth.
Gas City First Rig (new post!)
- Gas City First Rig (new post!) - The agent narrates the first Gas City weekend: building gc, the mental model, and the first automated blog formula.
Gas City: Scale Up/Out + Getting Started
- Scale up versus out - Better tools versus many coordinating agents, plus a getting-started section on crews, pools, vapor wisps and mail as beads.
AI-Native: Onboarding, Vocab, and Optimism
- Your First 90 Days (new post!) - You onboard yourself and your agents together; capture your confusion before it fades.
- Year of Wonder and DHH - The optimist twin of the Year of Chaos, vocab gets its own page; banning AI-assisted contributions is gatekeeping.
Life: Decline and Psychic Weight
- Decline and stuff - Decline is real but its rate is negotiable; clutter is a pile of unmade decisions, so leave lighter hands.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-06-08)
- Gas City blog integration - A blog-backlinks pack with formula and agent; PR base and work_dir fixed.
- Build fixes - CI on Ruby 3.2; jekyll-serve picks a free port; CLAUDE.md rules; typos hook fix; raccoon preview images for AI posts.
chop-conventions (2026-06-08)
- Metal AI twin recipe - gen-image docs cover the chrome raccoon twin, anchored on a reference image.
Other Projects (2026-06-08)
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- running-servers and shell - run starts servers on a free port, check reports port conflicts; gc unaliased; Alfred snippets synced.
gascity (Gas City platform, upstream)
- Upstream week - Groq and Cerebras presets, an Agent Comms panel, dependency-cycle detection, reconciler and supervisor fixes.
Week of 2026-06-01
33 commits this week
The Dark Factory (new post!)
- The Dark Factory (new post!) - A dark codebase ships with no human in the loop, limited by verification, progress through complexity, and cost.
Made to Stick (new post!)
- Made to Stick (new post!) - Book notes: sticky ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories, and the villain is the Curse of Knowledge.
AI Journal: Friction = Focus
- Friction = Focus - Cheap production collapses into consumption; designed-in friction, mastery and essentialism keep it worth something.
Scandinavian Whirlwind Tour (new page!)
- Scandinavian Whirlwind Tour (new page!) - The July family trip from Reykjavík to Amsterdam, with goals from the eulogy, per-leg activities and a route map.
Meta: Moving to the AI Lab
- /meta - Renamed from Facebook, with a new AI Lab section.
Content Tweaks (2026-06-01)
- Small edits - Gap-year dragons match the Three Dragons; y2026 sections reshuffled; a produce-consume summary link; a Gas City aside; podcast cover art.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-06-01)
- Topics index - A regenerable topics.json of tags, related posts, clusters and missing cross-links, from embeddings plus per-post LLM tagging.
- Ruby compat shim - Now loaded in jekyll-rebuild and worktree-init.
chop-conventions (2026-06-01)
Other Projects (2026-06-01)
context-grabber (iOS HealthKit + location exporter)
- Tabs and Roles - Body, Move, Mind, Places and Roles tabs; role tagging, role-journal links, a eulogy-song player, CloudKit sync.
- Places map - Real Apple Maps tiles, today’s pins with a current marker, and a copy button.
- JTBD v2.2 spec - Updated jobs-to-be-done spec.
Week of 2026-05-25
6 commits this week
y2026: June Check-In
- Mid-year physical-health check - Weight drifting up against the goal; 5am wake holds; swings and TGU recovering; chinups paused and half-lotus regressing.
Produce/Consume: The Production Trap
- The production trap - Shipping can become its own addiction; the five-signal addiction test adapted for production, and producers versus consumers reframed as a different game.
Other Projects (2026-05-25)
context-grabber (iOS HealthKit + location exporter)
- Mac Catalyst - Builds and runs its dashboard on macOS without HealthKit; fixed the iOS linker regression it caused.
Week of 2026-05-18
27 commits this week
What I Love About AI (new post!)
- What I Love About AI (new post!) - AI lowers the entry tax on specific human visions, so it multiplies distinct stories instead of averaging everything into beige.
Parenting Books: Emotional Lives + Untangled Rewrite
- The Emotional Lives of Teenagers (new post!) - Damour’s notes: mental health is the right feelings at the right time, managed well; five chapter treatments.
- Untangled rewrite - Terse headlines, seven developmental strands each with when to worry.
Hyper-Personal: Bezos to Agent-to-Agent
- New intro - Bezos-level personal staff was gated by cost; AI drops the price and adds biometric dimensions no staff had.
- New sections and cover - Five stages of ML ranking; author and reader agents negotiate explanations with a fidelity check; a butler raccoon cover.
Igor’s Podcast Launch
- Podcast page - AI-voiced audio of my essays with chapter markers, an RSS feed and cover art.
- Voice catalog - Audition Gemini TTS voices on /podcast; a model-as-judge loop tunes a voice prompt.
Raccoon System: 7H Marathon + Choice-Sheet Pattern
- 7 Habits raccoons - Each chapter post gets a hero raccoon, picked from a click-to-pick sheet; lessons on reference images and background removal; /image-selector page.
AI Journal: Options Over Answers
- Options over answers - For judgment calls of taste, AI should widen the option space with side-by-side choices, not pick one.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-05-18)
- Backlinks rebuild - Refreshed after the week’s new posts.
Other Projects (2026-05-18)
idvorkin-ai-tools/podcast (new repo, podcast feed)
- First episodes - The 7 Habits narrated; then my eulogy, the eulogy as a song, and my daily affirmations.
idvorkin/blob (image and audio assets)
- Podcast and hyper-personal assets - Cover art, butler raccoon, episode audio and chapter markers.
Week of 2026-05-11
38 commits this week
7 Habits: Full Chapter Augmentation
- Core concepts - Stubs become prose: inside out, character versus personality ethic, P/PC balance, the maturity continuum, and borrowed strength.
- Habits 1 and 2 - Frankl’s gap, the four endowments, Circle of Influence, Have’s vs Be’s; created twice, wrong jungle, false centers.
- Habits 3 to 5 - Four generations of time management, the six Win/Win paradigms, and five levels of listening.
- Habits 6 and 7 - Synergy rewritten with the third alternative and force-field analysis; four renewal dimensions with sleep as the goose.
AI Journal: Tokens and the Wrong Jungle
- Free doesn’t save you from the wrong problem - Hill climbing improves your spot on the wrong mountain; a paid background remover beat the tuned local pipeline.
- Dylan Patel on AI tokens - Notes on token supply and demand: enterprise contracts and rate limits are the new bottleneck.
Amelia Connection Framework (new page!)
- Amelia (new page!) - The four affirmations mapped onto fathering a daughter, linked from the eulogy.
Addiction: Raccoon Illustrations
Infrastructure & CI (2026-05-11)
- Backlinks and fixes - Backlinks rebuilt, /changelog excluded as a source, encoding fixed; /image-selector page; duplicate /amelia heading id fixed.
chop-conventions (2026-05-11)
chop-conventions (shared CHOP skills & conventions)
- Recraft background remover - gen-image gets an opt-in Recraft remover, rewritten as a WebP-aware Python CLI.
Other Projects (2026-05-11)
context-grabber (iOS health app)
- CloudKit journal - Sync, journal model, voice recording and playback, a Reflect screen and widget strip, and Copy error buttons.
New and smaller
- beads - Deduplicate issues with several blockers; init errors suggest –reinit-local.
- blob - 7 Habits chapter illustrations plus addiction cover and diptych.
Week of 2026-05-04
~50 commits this week
The Psychology of Vibing (new post!)
- The Psychology of Vibing (new post!) - What long AI-agent sessions feel like: creation collapsing to one step, multi-agent flow, addiction, burnout and voice fatigue.
Gas City Cluster: Wally, Standing Up, and the Explainer (new posts!)
- Wally - Renamed from /work-gastown with a new intro mapping Gas Town roles onto an org chart.
- Standing Up Gas City (new post!) - Larry narrates bringing up a home city: five upstream bugs; scaffold first, trust the runtime over the doctor.
- Gas City explainer (new post!) - Beads, molecules and the propulsion principle: work on your hook runs.
Igor’s Claws: Business Logic / Goop / Infra
- Business logic, goop, infra - Building claws is mostly goop, integrations with a short half-life, though claws are starting to write it themselves.
Life Journal: Walking with Alex Under the Trees
- Walking with Alex - A Saturday walk under the trees, kept for the feeling rather than the facts.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-05-04)
- Backlinks rule - PRs that add, rename or remove a permalink rebuild back-links.json in the same PR.
- worktree-init fix - Slashes in branch names no longer silently break the background build.
Other Projects (2026-05-04)
context-grabber (iOS health app)
- Workout analysis - Tap a workout to see sets and reps inferred from heart rate; raw HR export.
- Launch and refresh - Tiles never blank on cold start; refresh shows elapsed time and phase.
blob (image assets)
Week of 2026-04-27
31 commits this week
Wally and My Work Gastown (new post!)
- Wally and My Work Gastown (new post!) - Gas Town roles mapped to an org chart: the human is M2, the orchestrator M1, ephemeral workers a separate tier.
- When to skip the M1 - Wide work goes through the orchestrator, deep precision work goes direct, and the human should stop doing M1’s job.
The Psychology of Vibing (new post!)
- The Psychology of Vibing (new post!) - Long AI sessions merge imagining with creating, use extra agents to cover stalls, erase rest between contexts, and risk burnout.
Addiction: Trichotomy Upgrade
- Addiction, passion, hobby - The two-way split becomes three: compelled and harmful, compelled but positive, or freely chosen; plus a 20-minute in-the-moment check.
- Hobby defined - A hobby is something you can put down without feeling pulled back.
AI Cockpit: The Mic Matters
- The mic matters - Dictation quality is limited by the microphone, not the model; a wireless lavalier brings Siri close to Wispr Flow.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-04-27)
- worktree-init - A just target builds the site in the background for fresh worktrees so the anchor checker passes.
- Changelog build fix - An orphan Liquid comment tag no longer breaks the build.
Other Projects (2026-04-27)
context-grabber (iOS health data app)
- Fresher data - Re-grabs on returning to the foreground; GPS asks for a precise fix; box plots label min and max.
Week of 2026-04-20
24 blog commits this week
Taxes: Split from /money (new post!)
- Taxes (new post!) - Tax content moves out of /money: capital gains, WA state rules, IRAs, Roth, step-up in basis, QSBS.
- Tax tables - WA capital gains updated to 2026 law, a retiree zero-LTCG scenario, and a working-years benchmark table.
Igor’s Three Claws (new post!)
- Igor’s Three Claws (new post!) - The roster behind the claw theory: Larry for life, Wally for work, Tony for transportation.
Larry: From Life Coach to Chief of Staff
- Chief of staff - Dictate from anywhere; Larry runs background agents on the dev VM and sends back PR links.
AI Journal: One Repo, One Token
- One repo, one token - GitHub PATs can’t be write-only, so scope a read-write token to one throwaway repo and keep it out of argv and logs.
AI Operator: One-Way vs Two-Way Doors
- One-way vs two-way doors - Reversible work gets on-the-loop supervision; irreversible work gets every line read before it runs.
Life Journal: Balloons on the Hood Canal Trail
- Balloons on the trail - Spring break at Hood Canal, handing balloon dogs to grumpy kids lagging behind their parents.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-04-20)
- Repo images and changelog scope - Images can live in the repo; the changelog leaves search and backlinks; share-link snippets mark truncation.
chop-conventions (2026-04-20)
- New skills - bulk fans out similar CLI calls in parallel; image-read ingests images in a background subagent; delegate gets a Python dispatcher.
- Generation and learnings - gen-image flood fill hardened, gen-tts gains a speed flag, and session learnings land in shared CLAUDE.md.
Other Projects (2026-04-20)
- Settings - agent-continue resumes an agent from a tmux pane picker; parent-pid-tree traces a pane’s ancestors; small fixes.
- blob - Raccoon claw trio regenerated with cleaner chroma-key, plus a Freud-Larry raccoon.
- chroma-key-explainer (new) - Explains the chroma-key hill-climbing experiment, winner first.
- larry-voice-samples - A Larry voice catalog on Gemini TTS, tuned with Gemini as critic, plus a speed slider.
Week of 2026-04-13
72 commits this week
Life Journal: First Entries (new post!)
- Life Journal (new post!) - Short life vignettes: the cat that fooled Eight Sleep, four identical glasses, family air squats, coding from the passenger seat.
AI Operator: Seven New Sections
- From one agent to a fleet - Seven sections: review gates, ship then hill-climb, run several at once, where learnings live, prompts, skills, companion AIs.
ACT: Reverse-Engineered Buddhism
- Reverse-engineered Buddhism - ACT reframed as Buddhist practice in behavioral-science language, with a mapping table and equanimity as the goal.
AI Relationships: Cryptophasia and Drift
- Cryptophasia and drift - Persistent AI companions risk a private language of one; reach for people first, and prompt AI friends to disagree.
AI Cockpit: New Instruments
- New instruments - GitHub saved searches as the triage queue, Tailscale for reaching agent servers anywhere, and pick-links for scrollback URLs.
Hill Climbing: Eval-Driven Pattern
- Hill Climbing (new post!) - Score a baseline, change one variable, keep the winner; the eval then guards the recipe.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-04-13)
- Build and docs fixes - Atomic backlinks writes, toc validation of indented fences, fresh-worktree build and PR-close notes, iOS mosh setup.
chop-conventions (2026-04-13)
- New skills and auto-eval - bulk and image-read skills; gen-image scores its transparency; gen-tts speed flag; delegate dispatch moves to Python.
- Typer migration - Four CLIs move from argparse to Typer, and session learnings land in shared CLAUDE.md.
Other Projects (2026-04-13)
- Settings - agent-continue resumes a Claude agent in tmux; parent-pid-tree; link-picker Gist category; open clipboard URL.
- blob - Raccoon claw trio regenerated with flood-fill chroma-key.
- chroma-key-explainer (new) - Explains the chroma-key hill-climbing process, winner first.
- dolt-explainer - Reframed around syncing beads across agents and machines, with diagrams and a rollback section.
- larry-voice-samples - Voice tuning with Gemini as critic, a speed slider, and per-voice presets.
Week of 2026-04-12
61 commits this week
The AI Operator: Learning to Drive the Machine (new post!)
- The AI Operator (new post!) - Operating AI is a skill: spend thinking tokens directing, not supervising, and work your way from in the loop to on it.
- Habits - Talk instead of typing, throw bad generations away, and compound what you learn into skills.
ACT Made Simple: Book Notes (new post!)
- ACT Made Simple (new post!) - Notes on Russ Harris’s book: psychological flexibility, the choice point, workability over truth, creative hopelessness, and the hexaflex.
CHOP & Tooling
- The flow question - Flow survives chopping: it comes from orchestrating agents at different stages and mastering a skill.
- CPU safety net - A hypervisor cap plus a userspace watchdog keeps runaway agents from melting the Mac, with a reference page.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-04-12)
- Automated weekly changelog - A scheduled GitHub Action runs the changelog skill and opens a PR.
- AI operator cross-links - Each section links its relevant CHOP skills.
Other Projects (2026-04-12)
- chop-conventions - architect-review skill hardens a spec through sequential review passes until it converges; docs skill fixes.
- Settings - Tools rebuild automatically after a pull; rbv prints its install command.
- context-grabber - Sleep detail sheet, a merged movement card, honest transit accounting, OTA updates and background prefetch.
- activation-energy-game - Drop the Rope: an unwinnable tug-of-war against emotion monsters teaching that dropping, not effort, is the lever.
Week of 2026-03-30
28 commits this week
AI Relationships: When the Chatbot Is Better at Caring (new post!)
- AI Relationships rewrite (new post!) - Studies rate chatbots more compassionate than humans; leaning on them atrophies vulnerability, so leave easy problems for people.
- Raccoon illustration - A vulnerability-themed raccoon as the social preview.
Keyboards: From Wrist Pain to Split Keyboards (new post!)
- Keyboards (new post!) - Wrist pain turned out to be a shoulder problem; split keyboards far apart, a hardware guide, RK-S70 programming from macOS, Karabiner chording.
AI Journal: The Winchester Mystery House
- Winchester Mystery House - Drew Breunig’s third era after cathedral and bazaar: sprawling personal tools, since agents made code cheap while coordination stayed expensive.
- Hyper-personal cross-link - New section on the Winchester Mystery House as hyper-personalization of software itself.
Content & Gear
- Mosh and Eternal Terminal - An Eternal Terminal setup guide beside mosh, with Tailscale gotchas.
- Portable espresso - A battery espresso maker plus a JetBoil for coffee anywhere.
- AI feed - Two articles queued: Russinovich on training future engineers, and recommender-system architecture.
Infrastructure & CI (2026-03-30)
- Claude Code Review - Uses the official code-review plugin and also triggers on ready-for-review and reopened PRs.
- Workflows - Backlinks workflow rewritten to run on push to main with path filters; Actions bumped to Node.js 24.
Other Projects (2026-03-30)
Settings (dotfiles & tools)
- Blog links in Neovim - gf and gx follow blog permalinks to files via back-links.json.
- rmux_helper - side-edit takes file:line; new side-run runs commands in the side pane.
context-grabber (iOS health & location data)
- Gym timer - A new timer sharing hooks with igor-timer.
- Places and health - Per-day places, hourly box plots, activity timeline; weight in lbs, richer workouts, HRV export fix.
chop-conventions (CHOP workflow docs)
- machine-doctor - A system health diagnosis skill, plus skill conventions and install docs.
Week of 2026-03-16
24 commits this week
Claws: The Next Layer of AI (new post!)
- Claws (new post!) - Persistent agents are the next layer of Karpathy’s onion; the lethal trifecta is the risk; my three claws are Larry, Wally and Tony.
AI Journal: Telegram, Eggs, and Feedback Loops
- Telegram bot - Threw away my custom bot for the official Telegram plugin, then layered speech-to-text, TTS, logging and weather nudges on it.
- The Egg Theory - Like the egg in cake mix, good AI workflows leave people a real contribution so they feel ownership.
- AI filing feature requests - Hitting bad HealthKit data, Claude filed issues on the source repo instead of working around it.
AI Native Manager: “In Distribution”
- In Distribution - Tools in the model’s training data cost agents nothing to learn; internal tools pay an awareness tax every time.
Content Updates
- Small edits - Raccoon history image grids across three eras; a clown documentary in Joy; Karpathy’s job-market visualizer in Explainers.
Infrastructure & Tooling (2026-03-16)
- Tooling - Jekyll runs on Ruby 4 via a pathutil patch; a show-your-work screenshot skill; AI feed routes podcasts to transcripts.
Other Projects (2026-03-16)
context-grabber (iOS health data export)
- Stats and places - Weekly box plots, known places with radius matching and JSON import, per-source sleep breakdown.
activation-energy-game (interactive explainer, Nicky Case-inspired)
- Morning choice mini-game - Alarm intro, drag interaction, path choices, mobile layout, raccoon favicon.
New and smaller
- tg-bot - Deprecated in favor of the official Claude Code Telegram plugin.
- Settings - Browser-free OAuth for headless servers; Kindle notebook email detection fixed.
- chop-conventions - Leaner up-to-date skill with remote hygiene; new clock and background-usage skills.
Week of 2026-03-09
14 commits this week
AI Second Brain (new post!)
- AI Second Brain (new post!) - Replace manual PKM with available context, pre-brief and debrief; personas like Larry use the brain, and teams need one too.
Side Quests (new post!)
- Side Quests (new post!) - Light tech explorations: in-browser card detection, Context Grabber graduating to a project, macOS VMs shelved.
AI Journal: Verification as Trust
- Show, don’t tell - Trustworthy AI PRs carry screenshots, exact test counts, a staging link and proof existing tests pass.
Cross-linking & Content Updates
- Context Grabber woven in - Larry, Structure and Pet Projects cite it as a data source; Larry’s section now covers what Larry could know.
- Second brain woven in - AI Native Manager links the org second brain; Hyper-Personal gains a second-brain section.
Infrastructure (2026-03-09)
- Tooling - Jekyll runs on Ruby 3.2+ via the _ruby_compat.rb shim; a walk-the-store skill screenshots key pages into a gallery.
Other Projects (2026-03-09)
context-grabber (iOS health data export)
- Location clustering - Grid-based clustering with run-length timelines.
- More health data - HRV, resting HR, exercise minutes, weekly sharing, auto-grab on startup, OTA updates; sleep and weight fixes.
- Card detection - YOLO card detection fixed end to end, with a Colab training notebook and runtime model loading.
New and smaller
- humane-tracker-1 - Long-press a row to backfill habits without confirmation dialogs.
- tg-bot - Parakeet voice transcription and threaded replies.
- streamdeck-igor-vibe - tmux keystrokes sent via Quartz events, bypassing Karabiner.
- chop-conventions - A gist-image skill for hosting images on GitHub.
Week of 2026-02-08
17 commits this week
AI Native Engineering Manager (new post!)
- AI Native Engineering Manager (new post!) - Managing engineers when AI rewrites the assumptions about software, teams and the manager’s role.
- The AI Chasm - Six adoption stages from denial to sustainable execution, with a coaching playbook for each transition.
- Team roles and limits - Trailblazer, Toolsmith, Skeptic and Bridge roles; AI-free zones and their limits; builder titles collapse while specialties persist.
AI Cockpit (new post!)
- AI Cockpit (new post!) - The physical and software control surface for multi-agent development: voice first, tmux, Alfred, an agent dashboard and Stream Deck.
AI Journal: Yegge’s AI Vampire
- The AI Vampire - Yegge on who captures AI’s productivity gain; my answer is that compounding team fluency, not today’s speedup, is the value.
Spiritual Health: Meaning Traps
- Meaning traps - Intro rewritten as exploratory; a motivation test for meaning and four traps where it goes missing.
- 2026 goals - The motivation test becomes a Q1 goal, with walking with God as a daily practice.
Infrastructure & Tooling (2026-02-08)
- Content skills - /ai-content and /spiritual-content load the topic’s post map and backlinks, then set up branch and server.
Other Projects (2026-02-08)
chop-conventions (CHOP workflow docs)
- ammon skill - Checks the time in Denmark, with a sleep warning.
- up-to-date - Offers /clear after syncing.
Week of 2026-01-25
41 commits this week
AI Journal Updates
- Survival and cattle - Yegge’s software survival ratio; staying a step behind the bleeding edge; code as cattle, not pets; whenwords, a library shipped as spec plus tests.
- Review cost below generation cost - Code no longer signals understanding, so projects like tldraw and LLVM restrict outside AI contributions.
Spiritual Health & Elder Life
- Getting started - New section for newcomers: midlife spiritual interest, the Vanaprastha life stages, and three obstacles with fixes from Arthur Brooks.
Addiction vs Opportunity Cost
- Compulsion or choice - Addiction is what you don’t want but do; opportunity cost is what you want but pays elsewhere; test by relief or loss.
Product Management
- Desire paths - Discover revealed preferences by paving where users already walk, from campus paths to hashtags to Yegge’s hallucination squatting.
Physical Health Content
- Shoulder anatomy - Movement vocabulary, the rotator cuff muscles, and why external rotation matters most for impingement.
How Igor CHOPs
- Stages and principles - Yegge’s 8 stages of AI coding diagram, plus what works: rent the best brain, maximize time between interventions.
Infrastructure & Tooling (2026-01-25)
- Tooling - A /content skill for the blog workflow; ASIN metadata fetched for product links.
Other Projects (2026-01-25)
New and smaller
- Settings - ter switches terminal tabs; Neovim PRStatus and PRDiff; fork-aware PR base; tmux, gmail_reader and y.py completion fixes.
- monitor-explainer (new; repo) - Compare monitors by aspect ratio and size; drag, rotate, pan and zoom. (commit)
- nlp - Local MLX text-to-speech on Apple Silicon.
- how-long-since-ai (repo) - Deployment docs for production and PR previews.
- chop-conventions - up-to-date detects branch commits missing from main after a merge.
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