Subscribe
It's all spinning wheels & self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.
TL;DR: A smoky week in Portland brings back 2020 wildfire PTSD. My smart appliances have started nagging me to buy phones, the raccoons threw a midnight pool party and wrecked my fountain pumps, and the cats are handing out RPG quests. Plus, some thoughts on treating AI coding assistants as peers rather than tools.
TL;DR: It's been a hectic three weeks. The main event has been the slow, tense, and ultimately successful integration of our new cat, Minnaloushe, who graduated from "cat jail" to a tentative peace with the other furballs. In between managing the cat drama, I got a memorial tattoo for Puck, poured a ton of work into decafclaw and other side projects, and fell down a rabbit hole of game streaming and retro classics.
TL;DR: I built mixtapes.lmorchard.com to publish playlists on my own domain instead of leaving them trapped in Spotify, which spun off two new repos (byom-sync and byom-player). Plus more starnet gamedev (an exploit-barrage mini-game with a Butterchurn "brain damage" overlay), I finally ditched Disqus for remark42 after almost 20 years, and Minnaloushe is inching toward parole from cat jail.
TL;DR: This week saw Minnaloushe's 'cat jail' reintroduction process, deep dives into live-coding music with strudel.cc (including a cover!), and a major overhaul of the starnet project's audio engine and core mechanics. Plus, reflections on the web's evolution, LLMs, and other miscellanea.
TL;DR: I spent a good chunk of this week trying to drag a 14-year-old MacBook Pro into the present by way of every Linux distro that would boot, got a screen full of static for my trouble, and eventually clawed my way to a working Fedora install. Also: my Benchy finally floats, purple gaming gear keeps breeding on my desk, and I scheduled a memorial tattoo for Puck (lost in 2015).
TL;DR: It's been about three weeks since the last weeknote, so this is a catchup. The short version: our newest cat tried to murder one of the other cats and broke my heart a little, a raccoon declared war on our backyard pond, I learned the hard way that ASA needs a brim, and I poured an absurd amount of agent-driven coding into a procedural cyberpunk hacking game called starnet. Also Technology Connections made an hour-long video about ceiling fans and I was delighted.
TL;DR: A week that felt like nothing but Star Trek shitposts. Underneath that: two videos about being a nervous introvert, a serious darkwave bender, and an unreasonable craving for a Junji Ito horror-manga cardigan. About on brand, honestly.
TL;DR: A few weeks of catch-up. First tattoo (Catsby in a vine of purple flowers). The backyard pond is done, and the raccoons and crows have already moved in. Built out the rest of the me-to-markdown family and an orchestrator that fans them out in one fetch — this post is the first dogfooded weeknote drafted from its output. The AI-coding bookmark pile this period was mostly variations on being tired.
TL;DR: This week, my body is broken from digging a hole, my expensive controller is falling apart, and my cats are cute. Also, I fell down a rabbit hole of personal knowledge bases and AI agents.
TL;DR: It's been a weird 3 weeks. We adopted a new cat, a void named Minnaloushe. I also got completely sucked into the Artemis II mission, watching the livestream like it was my favorite TV show. Also featured in this post: more random crap and miscellanea than usual, because it's been a little while.
TL;DR: Got ADHD meds for the first time ever and promptly disappeared into a productivity fugue state, bookmarked an alarming number of articles about whether AI is killing the craft of programming, and declared myself a software meat popsicle.
TL;DR: I set out to spend an afternoon understanding OpenClaw. A week later I'd built my own agent with 80+ tools, a web UI, and self-reflection. Here's how that happened.
TL;DR: I built a skill to hook OpenClaw up to Tabstack - and it seems like a pretty great upgrade to the web fetch tool it comes with out of the box. Oh yeah, and OpenClaw is not nearly as scary as the headlines make it out to be.
TL;DR: Built an entire AI agent from scratch in a week, wrote two blog posts about it, got worked up about San Francisco's AI billboard hellscape, and bookmarked way too many things (again) about whether AI is making us smarter or dumber.
Your job changes into describing software. Now, if you're the kind of person who only ever wanted to have the end result, maybe this is a liberation. Sometimes, that's what mattered — we wanted to fast-forward to the end result, elegance be damned. But if you were one of those crafters? The people who wrote idiomatic code that made that programming language sing? There's a real grief here. It's not as serious as when we know a human language is dying out, but it's not entirely dissimilar, either.
TL;DR: Three weeks of weeknotes in one go. Wrote a blog post about AI grief that hit Hacker News (and got accused of being written by an LLM), fell deep into an Amiga 1200 rabbit hole, soldered the wrong potentiometer onto my Tempest PCB, survived a work trip to California, and spiraled into hardware-ownership doomsday thinking.
TL;DR: AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.
TL;DR: Enjoyed a 4-day weekend and completely forgot about weeknotes, spent way too much time troubleshooting a Tempest arcade machine that's been broken for 6 years (might actually be making progress?), dealt with the sad news that our favorite Portland bar closed, got Cosmo back from the vet looking very spaced out, started planning a Catsby tattoo, and collected yet another pile of bookmarks about AI coding agents while the cats increasingly tolerate each other.
