Notes for February 2-7

Half my working week was spent at an internal company thing, so I decided to make the best of my weekend and start cutting down on coding a bit.

I still want to spend most of my free time building things, but there is a bit of a grind associated with the current state of the agent ecosystem and I need to get back to building physical things.

But I just can’t stop myself from polishing stuff, and I was having a niggling issue with webterm and pyte, so I dove into ANSI land again and fixed tmux alternate-screen handling so that full-screen redraws don’t overlay stale content in the SVG snapshots, and finally figured out that Ink (the React TUI framework–yes, people are using React for TUIs…) had some quirks around screen clearing, so I ended up monkey-patching pyte to handle those.

The highlight of that was that I got some repeatable skills out of that–I used tmux itself as a debugging tool, and then got Copilot to write down the screenshot debugging workflow as a repeatable SKILL.md it can reuse later.

vibes got some ACP protocol fixes and now restarts the agent more consistently–I’ve been using it to update link tables in the wiki and add TODOs for myself, using Copilot and gpt-5-mini as a back-end, and I’m starting to question whether I need to keep developing python-steward–I kept poking at it, but I just don’t have the time to fully kit out an agent harness.

But I made sure to add some of the key missing pieces: It can scan .github/skills, load Copilot-style instructions, preserve SKILL frontmatter correctly, and structures the context correctly for caching, so I learned a lot about the “plumbing” of agent workflows, and I can always add more features later if I decide to keep going with it.

agentbox now ships with more built-in SKILL.md files and all the little conventions (how I structure workspaces, how I debug things, how I ship), so every new project starts with a decent set of skills to get the ball rolling, and I can just ask Copilot to adapt them to the project at hand.

To help me recover my Obsidian vault, I built daisy, a live disk usage sunburst visualizer, completely on a whim on my Linux laptop, and then ported it to the Mac (with a native Swift CLI version as well) because I wanted something with live updating and better performance than the existing options.

It’s also a nice demo for something I’ve been arguing (and occasionally annoying people with): SPEC-driven, agent-assisted development can be ridiculously fast when the problem is well-scoped and the feedback loop is tight.

Since I would be spending two days at the office, I decided to fix one of my gripes with Tailscale (the fact that it can’t resolve .local hostnames when you’re on the road) and ended up building mdnsbridge, a mDNS to DNS bridge that runs on a node that can see the LAN, queries avahi-daemon for .local names, and answers normal DNS queries with the results using Tailscale split DNS feature.

This also reduces an important bit of friction for me: I can use .local URLs and machine names for everything from everywhere, without having to worry about weird DNS names or tunneling into the LAN with a full remote desktop session just to get access to local-only services.

Another thing I’ve been tinkering with is apfelstrudel, an “AI Agent for music coding” that uses the strudel.cc engine.

And, finally, I published go-busybox, a busybox clone written in Go, because I wanted a sandboxable, WASM-ready set of Unix utilities that I can use as a base for building more complex agents and tools without having to worry about the security implications of running arbitrary binaries.

As usual, the icon was the most fun part to design, AI or not:

I think I have enough side projects for now, so I’m going to focus on circling back to some of the stuff I started during the holiday season and get it to a more polished state. But before that, I want to spend some time doing some electronics work and building some physical things…