Judge agents by the next prompt
guiding / agent workflow
New agents carry more work from intent to evidence, but that changes rather than removes the supervision problem. The next prompt reveals whether the result needs repair or is ready to extend.
Notes
Project notes and system notes.
Field notes, operating rules, incidents, reference designs, and bounded explorations. Guiding notes are in current use; prospective notes describe a direction; explorations test an idea; archival notes preserve useful context without claiming to be current guidance.
The ref nobody adds
guiding / agent workflow
The sprint database held 831 work items and seven doc refs, six of them the same document. The reference command existed the whole time. The missing piece was never a tool — it was placement on the path the agent actually walks.
Delivered energy
exploration / energy systems
A business plan for battery-swap delivered energy that works in one narrow niche and matters most for what it implies about EVs, home batteries, and off-grid design.
Layering you can't violate by accident
guiding / software architecture
homelab-analytics enforces its layer boundaries with pytest. A documented architecture is a request; a tested one is a constraint.
Moving a live cluster to a new subnet
guiding / cluster operations
Migrating a Talos cluster from a legacy subnet to its own VLAN while it kept serving. The design was mostly an ordering problem, plus one bootstrap loop: the network controller lives inside the network it manages.
NFC tokens pointing at a manifest
prospective / hardware contracts
Cassettes, diskettes, and cartridges as physical handles for digital media. The rule that makes the whole family of projects work: the tag points, it never hosts.
Subprocess, not service
guiding / agent workflow
actionq-dispatcher runs agent work as subprocesses inside a per-invocation coordinator. The rejected alternative was a long-running agent service, and the rejection is most of the design.
The aftertaste of resolution
guiding / agent workflow
Conversational refinement produces the feeling of having thought clearly, which is not the same thing as having thought clearly. The fix was not discipline. It was writing the stop rule into the counterpart.
The coordinator never touches the repo
guiding / agent workflow
Sprint work is split into plan, build, and review dispatches, and the orchestrating session is structurally barred from editing deliverables. The bar is the point.
Log as system
prospective / data architecture
A reference design for audit-native systems where code, layout, control decisions, and data are all log artifacts.
Schema on split
guiding / data architecture
A pipeline rule: land raw, split deterministically, enrich point-in-time, then shape for consumers.
The missing layer is binding, not intelligence
guiding / agent workflow
The useful workflow layer for solo agent work is not a giant orchestration stack. It is a local-first system that remembers claims, checkpoints, routing choices, and promotion boundaries without pretending one operator needs a whole platform team.
A GitOps rollback needs time to reach Git
archival / GitOps operations
A live rollback fixed a crashlooping workload, but the more interesting part was needing to suspend reconciliation long enough for the fix to become the desired state instead of a temporary lie.
Compatibility reports should be a little rude
archival / contract governance
Backend-owned contracts only become useful release artifacts once the compatibility tooling is conservative enough to complain about real breakage instead of politely missing it.
The boring auth boundary was right
archival / authentication architecture
Homelab analytics had enough auth surface to accidentally grow a second identity product. The useful decision was to keep identity proof upstream, keep authorization local, and demote local login to a narrow break-glass path.