Notes on engineering, product, and the craft of building software that earns its keep.
Checkpointing agent edits without touching git's index
A pattern worth stealing, found while reading T3 Code's internals: snapshot an agent's entire working tree per turn without ever touching the user's real index, HEAD, or branches.
Skip your own API when you own the database
A paginated REST endpoint took 120 seconds to aggregate 123k rows. One raw SQL query against the same self-hosted Postgres took 90 milliseconds.
Agents don't fail quietly: they loop
Multi-step tool agents rarely crash. They repeat themselves until the budget dies. Stuck detection is the fix.
Give multi-step agents a finish line
Unbounded tool loops burn tokens and never commit. Budget the turn: gather, think, then answer with tools off.
Agent scratchpads need sanitation, not vibes
Within-turn working memory is useful, and dangerous if untrusted text becomes an instruction the model obeys.
Don't parse follow-ups out of the reply
Streaming chat truncates. Markdown JSON fences rot. Suggested next steps belong in a typed side channel.
Don't dump the whole document into the context window
Long tool results crowd out the answer. Search, summarize, then read pieces: progressive disclosure for the model.
One keyboard, two Macs
Universal Control kept breaking on my desk. So I built OpenKVM: a small macOS app that shares one keyboard and mouse between two Macs.
Native widgets from React, without leaving JSX
Home-screen widgets and Live Activities usually mean writing Swift by hand. Brik keeps that surface in React and compiles down to native.
Ferry: Apple Watch as a Mac mic
I already wear a Watch. Ferry turns it into a system-wide microphone for the Mac on my desk.
Agent Skills aren't just prompts
We open-sourced Quivly Skills: reusable agent expertise for customer engineering and post-sales, not another prompt dump.
One MCP gateway beats twelve tool logins
When every team tool has its own auth story, agents can't help. A read-only MCP gateway is the shape I keep coming back to.
Agents draft. Humans release.
I want agents that make review cheap, not agents that skip the person who owns the blast radius.
What Swiggy-scale mobile actually taught me
Before startup life, I shipped mobile at Swiggy. Scale changes which bugs matter, and how little your happy path predicts production.
A personal agent fleet is just a small OS
I run messaging, memory, tools, and delegated agents on a VPS. Less sci-fi assistant, more private operating system for my own work.
