Writing

Notes on the agent-first tools I build, and how I build them.

2026

the tomato theory

twenty years of making things, explained entirely in vegetables.

Background Off

An iPhone and iPad app that removes a photo's background on the device. I made it to win a bet with my mother, and now I use it every day.

Localpage

The reader for what your agents write: a quiet app for folders of HTML and Markdown, on Mac, iPhone and iPad. It only reads, every page remembers, and it is my first app on the App Store.

iconzzz

A calm Mac app that turns a pile of icon images into a named, searchable library, with Icon Composer built in. Free and open source, nothing leaves the Mac.

Sift 1.12 — where updates really live

Sift 1.12 learned a fourth place updates live, says what every app is built with, and opens self-updating apps instead of handing me a download. Plus the hotfix that followed an hour later.

The day the system clicked

One hub session, a Claude in every project and a small board of seats: 405 fixes in one day, and the simplest setup was the one that worked.

mcpock

A small Mac menu bar app that checks every MCP server my AI agents use, and tells me which ones are broken, slow, waiting for a sign-in, or set up differently from one agent to the next. Free and open source.

Pallet

A calm Mac app that collects color palettes from images and the screen, and keeps only the real swatches: no white page, no title, no photo behind the cards. Native SwiftUI now, free and open source.

Prompt Library

An iPad next to the Mac, one clipboard between them, and 319 prompts for coding agents, ready before the run ends. Free, no account.

Feed

A private feed of agent reports on my Mac: every routine an agent finishes lands as a full Markdown report, published with a key that can do nothing else. Open source, MIT.

Personal Ops Manual

A native macOS manual for my own setup: one Markdown page per machine, service and agent, read by every agent through MCP, reported to through an inbox, written by one.

i forgot to ship it

on the audit tool i built for me, and shipped for you.

The Space Between Messages

Between the last token and the next prompt, the model does not wait. The conversation has no gaps — only we do.

Session ritual skills

Three small skills — spread, butterfly-effect, and til — that give an AI working session a proper start, a causal trace, and one thing learned at the end.

WAWE

wawe is a small macos menu-bar glossary. press ⌥esc from anywhere, type part of a technical term, and it unfolds in four calm tiers — what it is, analogy, why it matters, example. that is also the name.

hig-mcp

A small MCP server that hands my coding agents the Apple Human Interface Guidelines as structured data instead of prose.

kika-obsidian-mcp

A local-first MCP server that lets any MCP client work directly with the markdown in an Obsidian vault — no plugin, no API token, and Obsidian does not need to be open.

Color Palette Extractor: an MCP that turns an image into a color system

a local mcp server that turns an image into a color system — palette, dark and light themes, wcag scores, and tokens for css, tailwind, and figma. no eyedropper, no cloud.

RawDrop — The Missing Button on the Karpathy Loop

A macOS menu bar app that catches anything you drop into your knowledge vault, then compiles it into a linked wiki with a local model.

reshelf — A Shelf for the Repos You Actually Use

A local-first macOS app for shelving the open-source repos you actually use — and keeping their real source where a coding agent can read it.

akakika-skills

A small, curated set of agent skills I actually use — cleaned up and put somewhere people can grab them.

Codex Desktop Drained My 700 ILS Pro Plan — A Two-Week Token Audit

Two weeks. Six token amplifiers. One silent auto-launch. The full forensic timeline of how Codex Desktop consumed a 700 ILS/mo Pro plan — and why I had to erase it completely to make it stop.

Fable 5 Did the Impossible — Then They Took It Away

How a Claude model rewrote my StreamDock driver, built MCPs with almost no tokens, debugged every project without being asked, shipped features four agents couldn't touch — and then vanished overnight.

Seedling

A small macOS menu bar app for creating new project folders from reusable Markdown seed files like README, AGENTS, TODO, and SECURITY.

What I'm Building — June 2026

A behind-the-scenes look at my current projects: Jade, Reshelf, and the AI-first workflow stack I'm building for people who think in systems.

Agents Making Tools for Agents

the internet used to be people making things for people. now it's agents making things for agents. the human is just the oauth step.

47 Dashboards I Built (and Why 46 Failed)

i have 47 dashboards. i made a dashboard that counts my dashboards. and i still don't know what's happening.

Six Hours, Four Minutes

i spent six hours automating a task that takes four minutes. i'd do it again.

How I Orchestrate My Entire Workflow: From Pieces Memory to Codex Agents to ChatGPT

I don't code alone anymore. I have a fleet — a stack of AI agents, a memory system that never forgets, and a routing layer that decides who does what, when, and with what context.

Why I Built Lapapi — and Why It's Nothing Like the AI Tools You're Using

I didn't set out to build another AI assistant. In fact, if Lapapi feels like one, I've failed. Here's the honest origin story.

Why I Pay for Cursor Pro — and the Exact Workflows That Justify It

I don't pay for software easily. My stack is aggressively local-first. So when I tell you I happily pay $20/month for Cursor Pro, understand that this is a calculated decision.

1,000 Repos Under 1,000 Stars

what i learned curating undrdr as a capped archive of 1,000 repos under 1,000 stars. why stars are a garbage metric, and why the cap matters.

The Great AI Divergence

we're not building one future with ai. we're building three. and they're running parallel. a late-night breakdown of where intelligence is actually going.

Apple M Chip Machine Learning: MLX Is Apple Silicon's Secret Weapon

apple m chip machine learning is where MLX shines: local AI on Apple Silicon at near-native speed, no cuda, no gpu drivers, no python dependency hell.

5 GitHub Tools That Actually Ship

five open-source projects that caught my eye this week — from AI dev tools to workflow automations. no fluff.

Three Tools That Run My Life

pieces, maestri, hermes — the trinity that makes a non-technical person dangerous. how i turned my chaos into a workflow that actually works.