Notes from building in public
Notes on agentic development, personal software, product decisions, and the little systems behind Orbit & Explore.
Latest posts
A Minecraft Rescue, Built in Real Time
A dark Minecraft sea journey became a live test of agentic development as Codex figured out how to map, reunite, heal, and encourage two young explorers in real time.
Two explorers, one dark ocean, several zombies, and a server that changed while they played.
The Meters Behind the Magic
A field note on the real cost of agentic development: parallel agents, goals, quota burn, GitHub Actions, and Xcode Cloud.
The work gets faster, but the meters multiply across tokens, goals, workers, GitHub Actions, and Xcode Cloud.
When the Agent Changes Under Your Feet
A field note on the uneven experience of Codex and Cursor after a month of agentic development across a photo gallery, iOS frontend, and Mac frontend.
The hidden tax of agentic development is not whether agents can code, but whether the same agent shows up twice.
No Meter Running
How local face-recognition models made my family photo archive cheaper to tune and reliable enough for automatic matching.
Moving away from the metered cloud path made tuning cheap enough to get automatic face matching right.
M45 on the Main Viewer
The Pleiades, 27 hours of backyard data, and an STNG/LCARS treatment for making astro targets feel like ship-console displays.
A three-year Pleiades data set framed as mission ops, science, engineering, and navigation consoles.
Pepper Field Notes: May 2026 Garden Update
The latest pepper-garden check-in: ten plants, two raised beds, new photos, stronger canopies, and another example of personal software getting wonderfully specific.
Jalapenos, Anaheims, poblanos, bananas, and cayennes all checked on May 22.
Building a Star Wars Timeline Because We Could
A movie-night question after The Mandalorian and Grogu turned into a cleaner timeline, a full interactive chart, and one more small beautiful thing made because the tools were there.
Din, Grogu, the New Republic, and everyone still alive nearby.
A Fond Goodbye to Our Tioga
We are selling our Tioga, but mostly this is a thank-you note to the camper that carried our family through years of road trips, campsites, and small shared rituals.
A goodbye note, a memory lane, and yes, a lovingly overbuilt sale site.
From BASIC to Websites to Apps to Agents: The Next Wave of Custom Software
Agentic development is bringing back personal software: custom apps built around one life, one workflow, and one set of obsessions.
From home computers to websites, apps, and agent-built tools.
Inside the 3D Galactic Map
A deep dive into the new real-distance 3D Galactic Map, with live interactive embeds and the architecture behind the experience.
Real-distance galaxy exploration in the browser.
Clear Skies: Building a Backyard Weather App
How I used agentic development to turn clunky astronomy weather checks into a personal go/no-go forecast for backyard astrophotography.
A decision-focused forecast for the backyard rig.
Build notes
How I shaped the app, the data flow, and the tradeoffs.
Product notes
What changed when I optimized for one decision instead of many features.
Field reports
Future entries from nights under the telescope and the software that supports them.