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Technology

The map I wish I'd had

The map I wish I'd had

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff Eleven months. Seven repositories. Four abandoned projects. One rename that mattered. This is the last post of the series, so here's the whole journey on one page — and the map I wish

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    An AI agent filed a bug report on the harness it was running in

    An AI agent filed a bug report on the harness it was running in

  • July 20, 2026
  • KickoffAuthor: Claude Code agent (Opus 4.7), driving the Collective harnessOn the 23rd of May 2026, a detailed bug report landed in one of my repos, and that's its author line. Three

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    Recap: Act IV — Into the Office

    Recap: Act IV — Into the Office

  • July 20, 2026
  • Act IV was the shortest act and the hardest engineering: people. The recap, before the final stretch.AI Week, four times — four back-to-b

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    I had to walk backwards into work

    I had to walk backwards into work

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff At home I had versioned, installable agent harnesses with drift detection and a marketplace. At work, I didn't bring any of it. Instead, I forked a workflow baseline the company alrea

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    AI Week, four times: nearly forty people, one room, one library

    AI Week, four times: nearly forty people, one room, one library

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff For most of this series I've been alone in a room with git repos, answerable to nobody but the commit history. This post is about the opposite: nearly forty colleagues, four consecutiv

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    Recap: Act III — Naming the Thing

    Recap: Act III — Naming the Thing

  • July 20, 2026
  • Act III is where the series earns its title. February to May 2026, recapped — before the story finally walks into the office.**[The weekend rebuild](/off-the-model/08-the

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    Package the environment, not the prompt

    Package the environment, not the prompt

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff Eleven days. That's how long it took after April's persona→harness rename for the idea to jump products. April 6th: ynh renames its whole world around harnesses. April 17th: my IDE gr

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    The day my project renamed itself

    The day my project renamed itself

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoffrefactor: rename persona → harness across entire codebase**There's a commit in my history dated the 6th of April 2026 that I'd frame and hang on the wall, if you could do that with

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    I built an IDE over dinner

    I built an IDE over dinner

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff By early January 2026 my agentic setup had given me a brand-new problem: I was too productive to know what I was doing. Ten-plus terminals open at once, most of them running agents on

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    The weekend I rebuilt what I already knew

    The weekend I rebuilt what I already knew

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff The git history says I built it in one weekend: fifty-eight files, ten thousand lines, landed in a single commit on the 2nd of February 2026. The git history is lying, and the lie is t

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    Recap: Act II — The Building Sprint

    Recap: Act II — The Building Sprint

  • July 20, 2026
  • Act II was three weeks of December and January in which I stopped writing prompts and started building structure. The recap, before the story gets a name.**[The bottlenec

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    My best failure took 36 hours

    My best failure took 36 hours

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff Seventeen commits. Thirty-six hours. Abandoned. Let me tell you about the best project I ever killed. Late January 2026, I took one more run at an old dream: a proper prompt distribut

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    The most important refactor I did all year fit in one line

    The most important refactor I did all year fit in one line

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoffrefactor: align cli and mcp more with zod schemas3rd of January 2026 — a commit message so boring you'd scroll straight past it. It turned out to matter more than anything else

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    I started logging everything the LLM did — inside git

    I started logging everything the LLM did — inside git

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff Three days after Christmas 2025, I started building a system whose entire job was to write down what the AI actually did. Not what I asked it to do. Anyone can write down a request; m

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    December 2025: the month the bottleneck moved

    December 2025: the month the bottleneck moved

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff The new models didn't make my prompts better. They made my prompts irrelevant. When Anthropic's new Sonnet and Opus models landed in December 2025, something qualitative shifted. For

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    Recap: Act I — The Before Times

    Recap: Act I — The Before Times

  • July 20, 2026
  • Three posts in, and the prompt era is behind us. Before the story speeds up, the recap — and a clean place to join if you're new here. Act I was August to November 2025, and it looked like this:

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    My first agent managed my music downloads. It still does.

    My first agent managed my music downloads. It still does.

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff The first genuinely useful thing my AI setup ever did was tidy my downloaded music. Not a rule. Not a threat. A chore, quietly delegated. August 2025, one day after starting my prompt

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    Anatomy of a naive prompt library

    Anatomy of a naive prompt library

  • July 20, 2026
  • Kickoff My 2025 prompt library had a filing system a Victorian clerk would have admired, in service of a legal code no court would recognize. 001-Central-Context.md. `200-Standards-Context.

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    In August 2025 I was shouting at an LLM in all-caps

    In August 2025 I was shouting at an LLM in all-caps

  • July 20, 2026
  • KickoffMANDATORY: You MUST work ONLY in the specified working directory. NO EXCEPTIONS.That is Clause 27 of a legal code with a jurisdiction of one machine and no court of appeal. I wrot

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