Category: Uncategorized
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Why Is My WSL Disk 150 GB? A Journey Through Docker, VHDX Files, and Hidden Disk Usage
Recently I felt some poor performance on my Windows laptop workstation. WizTree reported that my largest file was: Nearly 150 GB. The obvious conclusion was: “I must have enormous projects.” I was wrong. Step 1: Finding the VHD PowerShell quickly identified the culprit: Output: At this point I considered deleting WSL entirely. After all, most…
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Making Claude Slightly More Concerning
One of my favorite discoveries in Claude Code is that you can customize the status messages that appear while the AI is working. Instead of seeing the usual: you can provide your own spinner verbs. Naturally, the first thing I did was teach my AI to sound like an impending robot uprising. Now, while it…
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# Final Analysis — 2026 US Open DFS
2026 US Open DFS Analysis 2026 US Open DFS Analysis Generated: 2026-06-17 1. Goal Recap Build the optimal 6-player DraftKings Classic Golf DFS lineup for the 2026 US Open at Shinnecock Hills. Salary cap: $50,000. Scoring rewards birdies (+3), eagles (+8), bogey-free rounds (+3 bonus), and finish-position bonuses (1st = +30 pts). Objective: maximize expected…
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When AI + JSFiddle = The Perfect Quick Fix
Had a simple but annoying task today: take a massive block of text (no spaces) and split it into 5-character chunks. You’d think AI could handle this easily, right? Wrong. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to manually split a long string into 5-character blocks and watch it hallucinate, drop characters, or just give up halfway through.…
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Stop Writing Resumes. Build a Career Knowledge Base.
Every time I help someone apply for a job, I see them doing the same thing to begin: opening up a Word document and manually editing a resume to match the position. That process made sense in 2005. It doesn’t make much sense in the age of AI. The Resume Is Not the Asset Most…
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Agents need *nix Permissions, Not Just Prompt Files
Everyone building AI coding workflows right now seems to converge on the same pattern: And to be clear: these help. But after watching one of my coding agents decide to make a direct change to AWS infrastructure through the AWS API — despite explicit instructions that infrastructure changes must go through Terraform — I started…
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The Post-Framework Optimization Era
this post formatted by AI for clarity, typos and readbility For the last fifteen years, software engineering has largely been a search for leverage through abstraction. Frameworks promised that if we accepted enough structure, conventions, lifecycle rules, and tooling complexity, we could dramatically reduce the amount of code humans had to write and maintain. And…
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The “Just Store the Images in the Database” Trap
One of the easiest mistakes for newer developers — especially in the age of vibe coding and AI-assisted app building — is storing uploaded images directly in the database. And honestly, it’s not just beginners. Even experienced engineers say things like: “We’re not going to have that many images.” “It’ll be simpler if everything is…
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Postman Saves My Ass (Again): Using AI to Turn Your API Into a CI Safety Net
/** AI used to format this article and clean up typos **/ The Prompt That Changes Things If you’ve got an API, try telling your AI this: “I want a Postman suite that gives me complete coverage of my API, that I can run locally but also runs as a GitHub Action when anyone makes…
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Database Best Practices: Designing for Failure, Not Hope
What Prompted This Post Two days ago, the founder of PocketOS shared a now-viral account of how an AI coding agent deleted his company’s production database—and the backups along with it—in a single automated action. With no viable recovery path, the team was forced to restore from a three-month-old backup that had only existed for…
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Turning a Product Into a System of Truth: Why We Built product.json
Most product teams have a quiet problem they don’t talk about enough: Everyone is working from a slightly different version of the product. Sales is pitching what they think exists.Product is planning what should exist.Engineering is building what was specified—weeks or months ago. And then AI shows up, and suddenly that ambiguity isn’t just inefficient—it’s…
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AI + Speckit: Turning Observability into Faster, More Predictable Engineering
TL;DR Put this prompt into your AI Assistant: “I want to increase observability in my legacy project, and make it a critical component of all future development using speckit.” If you’re managing an engineering team, you already know this pattern: The issue isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of structured insight. Combining AI…
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OpenClaw, Codex, and the Billing Trap *Again*
I thought I had already learned this lesson. I had written it down once: do not put OPENAI_API_KEY in a global shell environment when using Codex over VS Code Remote SSH. ChatGPT billing and OpenAI API billing are separate systems. If Codex sees an API key, it may use API billing instead. That mistake cost…
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Building Cheap, Rule-Driven Gmail Alerts with IMAP and OpenClaw
See an important follow up to this post first! I wanted a simple system: watch Gmail for messages that actually matter—especially job application replies—and send a WhatsApp alert when something actionable shows up. The first version worked. It was also unnecessarily complicated. What I really needed was something predictable, cheap to run, and easy to…
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How I F-ed up the OpenClaw/Codex install (again)
I’ve been a ChatGPT Plus user for about two years. I’m a developer, and I use Codex constantly—it’s easily my preferred AI for coding. Most of my work happens over Remote SSH on a headless Ubuntu box I run called NATHAN. It sits quietly on my local subnet behind a firewall, doing real work. This…
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AI for Public Good: Can We Patent Future Meds to Benefit Humanity?
There’s an uncomfortable idea I can’t shake: What if the only way to keep the future of medicine open… is to grab it first? That sounds aggressive—because it is. But it might also be necessary. The Problem: Innovation Gets Locked Up Modern medicine doesn’t just run on science—it runs on intellectual property. When a company…
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AI and Guns: Power, Risk, and the Illusion of Control
There’s a comparison people don’t like to make—but probably should: artificial intelligence and guns. At first glance, they seem worlds apart. One is software; the other is hardware. One lives in data centers; the other in holsters and safes. But at their core, both are immensely powerful tools that amplify human capability. And that amplification…
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Why VS Code Wasn’t Updating on Ubuntu (and the surprisingly annoying fix)
I ran into something recently that felt simple on the surface but turned into a bit of a rabbit hole: VS Code just… wasn’t updating. No errors. No warnings. Just silently stuck on an old version while everything else on the system updated fine. And every time I started VSCode it said “There is a…
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AI Is Like Hiring 1,000 Junior Engineers Overnight
There’s a lot of excitement around AI writing code. And that excitement is justified. AI can produce code faster than any individual developer ever could. It can scaffold services, write tests, generate APIs, and even refactor existing systems. But the best way to understand AI isn’t as a replacement for engineers. It’s as something else…
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When they lay you off too soon
When I was working for Palm, I came to them because they bought out startup AnyDay.com. If you believe in patents, which I don’t, we invented the online calendar, which is why they bought us. After the dotcom crash at the end of 2001, Palm decided in their shortsighted way that their future was as…