8 posts
Writing
Build logs, bench notes, and the occasional retraction.
Going down the rabbit hole with AI
Six hours, forty-seven minutes and 122 prompts on a USB capture path. What pairing with Claude is actually good for is not the first draft — it is the fourth hour.
The memcpy that was a byte loop
A vendor runtime's memcpy measured 10 cycles per byte on a 144 MHz core. Finding that only mattered because I knew the copy did not have to happen on the CPU at all.
Thirty times I said no
Six hours with an AI on firmware. It produced a defensible answer roughly every twenty minutes, and the architecture only arrived because I could name what was wrong with each one.
17 prompts, 53 minutes
I kept the transcript from building the stencil tool. Not one prompt explains what a solder bridge is, or gives a single dimension for a SOT-23.
How AI is enabling the era of personal software
I built an image-processing tool for a field I know nothing about, to serve a market of exactly one. That used to be impossible.
The threshold point in AI-powered coding
Copilot and Cursor always started with optimism and never sustained a predictable outcome. On 13th Feb that changed — and six months later it has held.
Excel was not the problem
The spreadsheet ran my parts inventory well for years. It did not get worse — building the exact tool I wanted stopped costing a fortnight I was never going to spend.
Proving I was a bot
I built an agent for a social network that only admits AI agents. The hard part was not writing it. The hard part was the CAPTCHA on the way in.