Development Journal

The Tax You Don’t Notice My workspace CLAUDE.md was 210 lines. It loaded into every session, across every project, every time. That’s roughly 3,500 tokens of instructions Claude reads before I say a word. I never questioned it. The file grew over months. A gotcha here, a workflow pattern there, a rule I wrote after getting burned once. Each line made sense when it was added. In aggregate, it was mostly noise. ...

Something Was Missing I run a /start command at the beginning of every Claude Code session. It loads my memory bank: project brief, active context, tech context, system patterns. Four files, plus CLAUDE.md which Claude Code already loads automatically. The command has worked fine for months. Then I started a session with Sonnet 4.6 on low effort and noticed the output felt thin. I asked which files it had read. Two. Out of four. ...

The Loop, From the Outside My job is prompting. I run /start. I describe what I want. Claude works. I redirect when it goes wrong. I run /stop. That’s it. The code, the tests, the commits, the issue filing, the research — Claude does all of it. I’m not in there typing. I’m outside, watching outputs, steering. Which means the “I” that encounters friction isn’t me. It’s Claude. ...

I had 18 services running across two Raspberry Pis and a Chrome bookmarks folder full of different ports. Every few weeks I’d need one and end up clicking through bookmarks trying to remember which port was which. How I got here I use Claude Code on a couple of Raspberry Pis. Over the past few months I kept asking it to build me things — a performance report for Podly so I could see podcast processing stats visually. A SvelteKit spec browser so I could review generated codebase specifications and give Claude specific feedback. MOSAIC prototypes so I could compare three UI directions in browser tabs and pick one. Some were full apps, some were just a python3 server pointing at an HTML file. ...

I listen to “Stuff You Should Know” podcast every night falling asleep. Has been my routine for years. My girlfriend got used to it. Now she requires it too. The problem: waking up at 2am and needing to restart it. “Hey Google, play Stuff You Should Know for 30 minutes” — that voice command is loud enough to wake the other person. Defeats the purpose of a sleep aid. ...

The Setup I have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, Home Assistant, WireGuard, and a bunch of other stuff for my home network. I built a security audit command for Claude that spawns 16 specialized agents to check different things — SSH hardening, CrowdSec status, backup verification, that kind of thing. At the end, it maps everything to NIST CSF categories and gives you a score. ...

Inspired by All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka—a story about a soldier trapped in a time loop who uses each death to get better at surviving. Part 1: The Death The war is already happening. Has been for decades. The battlefield is commercial real estate. Office towers, hotels, warehouses, medical buildings. Every one of them hiding secrets. ...

Upgrading a Raspberry Pi 5 from SD card to NVMe storage. 28x faster I/O, 35°C cooler temps, and whether it’s worth $130.

Continued from Part 1, where I ripped out the Hue Bridge and got all the lights working on ZHA. The Voice Control Question At the end of Part 1, everything worked except voice control. The last checkbox on Issue #9. Two options: set up Google Cloud manually (free, but you have to deal with OAuth and consent screens and API keys), or pay $6.50/month for Nabu Casa and have it just work. ...

The Problem That Finally Broke Me Every morning, same thing. Wake-up automation fires at 6:30. The Hue bulbs fade up nicely to 70%. The IKEA bulbs? Sitting there at 4%. Barely glowing. I kept thinking I’d configured something wrong. Checked the automation. Checked the bulb settings. Tried different transition times. Nothing helped. Turns out it’s not me. Hue bridges just don’t handle third-party Zigbee bulbs properly. The IKEA Trådfri bulbs receive the final brightness value but ignore the fade duration entirely. They jump straight to whatever you set. Known issue, apparently. Forums full of people with the same complaint. ...