Field notes & deep-dives
Notes from building distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production-grade GenAI agent architectures.
Why I Built Discovery Quest
A father of three on turning inevitable screen time into a curiosity engine: a voice-first learning world guided by Luna the owl, with an AI-native open-core engine where courses are data an AI can draft and a validator can prove.
Creating Demo Videos the Agentic Way
A product demo built as code, not recorded: ElevenLabs voiceover (it can clone your own voice), Playwright screen capture seeded with real data, ffmpeg mixing with sidechain ducking, and a generated YouTube thumbnail — driven end to end by an agent, and re-rendered with one command.
Building From My Phone: Claude Code, caffeinate, and an ngrok Tunnel
Remote control drives your local machine — not the cloud. That one fact is what makes a phone-based build-and-preview loop possible: keep the Mac awake with caffeinate, tunnel the dev server with ngrok, and review on the go.
Your Context Window Is a Budget
The model is stateless, so every turn re-sends the whole conversation plus fixed overhead — a real shock to most people. Once you see context as a recurring budget, /context, /compact, /clear and /rewind stop being magic.
Parallel Claude Code: Worktrees and Named Sessions Without the Chaos
Running several agents against one repo breaks on shared state — one working tree, one branch. Here's the collision (with real git output), and the fix: a worktree per task and a name you can resume by.
The .env That Vanished: What Claude Code's deny Rules Actually Protect
I was certain my own security config was eating my .env in git worktrees — certain enough to write it up as advice. Then I instrumented the hook instead of guessing. The deny rule was a red herring; the real bug was one missing mkdir.
Local or Remote? A Decision Rule for Scheduling AI Agents
The hard question about a scheduled agent isn't what it does — it's where it runs. The deciding axis is the secret, not the task — plus why an agent's instructions belong in version control.