Notes on building a personal AI operating environment.
I write about what I have built around Anthropic's Claude Code, including the memory, hooks, safety layers, infrastructure and the specific patterns that have earned their place; every post is grounded in something concrete rather than in speculation about the future of AI.
Techniques
All techniques →Five skills that have shaped how I work, each with a short page explaining what it does and why it earned a permanent slot in my own setup.
A persistent task runner with a retry loop and an email fallback, so "email me when done" actually means that.
Read →Claude, Gemini and GPT-5.4 on the same question in parallel, with a blind round followed by informed rounds; the receipts come from several months of use.
Read →Nightly consolidation that promotes useful session insights into the canonical topic files, which is the memory layer that stops rotting.
Read →Build a task-specific context file before the task starts; the sub-session then reads only that file, which stops the usual context-window guessing.
Read →Twenty-three numbered patterns of how I have broken my own system, checked against every non-trivial change before it ships.
Read →Featured essays
A personal AI operating environment: worked example and receipts
What happens when one person uses an AI coding assistant as the primary interface to a real physical and operational life, and systematically fixes every failure that occurs along the way.
Six layers of defence for an AI agent over a 3D printer
The printer-safety architecture I now run, the specific incidents that produced each layer, and why the pattern generalises beyond 3D printing.
Lessons as code: turning postmortems into pre-flight checks
A file I read at the start of every session, twenty-three numbered patterns of how I have broken my own system, and the pre-flight skill that checks proposed work against them. The pattern is the most portable thing on this site.
Recent writing
All writing →- EssayContext as a first-class artifact: the /deep-context pipelineA context window is a budget. Stop hoping the right things will end up in it; build the file before the task starts. The reframe, the worked example and when it is worth the cost.
- Story918MB, an Ofsted inspection, and a governor who is not a developerOne of the schools in my kids federation was rated Requires Improvement and is waiting on a re-inspection. The evidence base is 1,650 files and 918MB, which no governor was realistically going to read end to end, so a few of us built something that could.
- StoryBuilding from my phone while watching the kidsThe five-step evolution of how I reach the development environment on the Mac Mini from an iPhone in a playground. Where you build shapes what you build.
- Essay"Email me when done": a persistent task runner with a delivery guaranteeLong-running tasks fail silently if the session dies before the result is ready. This is the runner I built to make "email me when done" actually mean that. Retry loop, fallback email paths, and a last-ditch file.
- StoryFrom model to agent: what changed when I stopped predicting and started investigatingWhy the regression models that came out of the hackathon got replaced within weeks by three agentic tools. Probability scores without narrative are not what analysts need.
- EssayMemory that sleeps: a tiered memory architecture with daily consolidationA two-tier retrieval system (semantic plus keyword), canonical topic files as curated truth, and a nightly consolidation pass that promotes session insights into the canonical tier. Why each piece exists and what fails without it.
- EssayOne hour, one command: disaster recovery for a solo AI shopWhat backups, what intentional exclusions, and a sequence that reconstitutes the whole personal AI operating environment in under an hour. The honest version, including the accepted gaps.
- StoryOne hour, one marketing listA vague ask ("give me a list of prospects that look like X") turned into a working pipeline across three data sources in under sixty minutes. A small build, but the speed is the point.