Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
Stop retrying the prompt: what the brief ledger taught the image harness
Four sessions into generating hero illustrations, I was still fixing the same structural mistakes on different posts. Each bad render was a lesson. The retry loop wasn't keeping them.
Both voice iterations failed the Cash ISA test. I shipped the original.
Two iterations of the uk-calculator-voice skill (analytical v2.0.0 and warmth-corrected v2.1.0) both failed the same blind A/B on Cash ISA drafts. The original v1.0.0 won both rounds. The ship was v1.1.0: a reset to the passing baseline with the recovery path formalised, not a third iteration attempt.
The inbox filter model drops strangers silently. I built a queue instead.
Inbox filters drop what they don't recognise. I wanted a record instead: every unknown sender parked, every blocked arrival logged, nothing silently gone. Five tables, four sync branches, and a historyId cursor later, the editorial pipeline's Inbox Hub does exactly that.
Archon was burning quota. The fix was a hook, not a scheduler.
Three Archon runs in flight simultaneously, two of them fired without a deliberate decision. The instinct was to build a smarter scheduler. What worked was a global PreToolUse hook that intercepts archon workflow run and forces a pause before anything spawns.
Making Gmail tractable in a day. Four branches and one partial index.
The Inbox Hub shipped in five sprints, all on the same day. The classifier is four comparisons against a rules table. The speed comes from a partial index on pending senders, not from the sync logic. Neither changed how I read email.