Rui CarmoWell, there went another work week. Slightly better (to a degree, although I got some discouraging news regarding a potential change), and another week where piclaw ate most of my evenings–it went from v1.3.0 to v1.3.16 in seven days, which is frankly absurd even by my standards.
But there was a lot of ground to cover, and it’s turned into a sort of “agentic IDE” thing at this point, terminal and all:
piclaw
Most of the week went into reliability work. I spent a day or so doing a full refactor, and then got three different LLMs to do a comprehensive full-stack audit of the turn/queue/steering system–which turned up a bunch of race conditions in message submission that I’d been chasing for weeks (plus proper queue deduplication and retry caps, which I should have added from the start). The deferred followup system I was using for steering was also broken in subtle ways–turns were inheriting stale thread roots, which caused all sorts of weirdness. The fun bits were the visual polish and theme support, but those came after the plumbing was solid.
On the UX side, I added Adaptive Cards rendering to the chat timeline (with validation and lifecycle flows)–the idea being that agents can now push structured forms, tables, and interactive elements into the conversation instead of just Markdown. The workspace editor got markdown attachment previews and a Ghostty-based terminal lifted directly from webterm, plus a bunch of pipework for future multi-chat support (which is going to be a whole thing).
All of it involved, as you would expect, a lot of agent herding, and I had plenty of time to come up with stuff like this:
And I cleaned up all the JS vendoring, since like pi itself, piclaw is now an extension host, so most of the new features are actually implemented as extensions.
python-office-mcp-server
I dusted off a Python-based Office document MCP server I’d been building alongside go-ooxml and carved it into its own repository. It’s a pretty comprehensive set of tools for reading, editing, and generating Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents via MCP–unified interface, template support, auditing, the works. It’s stable enough that I decided to publish it as-is, with zero ongoing support commitment. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a side project is to ship it and walk away.
Wiki Archaeology
As to this site, I did another big batch of old page conversions–around 200 wiki pages from the hardware and apps sections got modernized from Textile to Markdown with proper frontmatter, descriptive image filenames, and cleaned-up links. Some of these pages date back to 2002, which is always a weird trip.
What I should be doing, though, is celebrating Marchintosh and building a new Mac Classic replica–but all I’ve done hardware-wise has been benchmarking SBCs for a potential new project. I hope to clean up my notes and post something about that next week.