Writing
Thoughts on software, technology, and whatever else I find interesting.
Engineering
Oct 7, 2026 · 9 min
Every entry SquareLog's AI reads was written by one parent about their own custody case. PR #429 appends a two-tier PERSPECTIVE AND BIAS block to every chat, declaration and email prompt and adds one notice to the screen. It watches the model and leaves the user alone.
Engineering
Oct 7, 2026 · 8 min
Dependabot's anthropic 0.122.0 to 1.0.0 bump passed every check on SquareLog and would have failed every production model call with a TypeError. The suite never imported the SDK. The fix moved one keyword into extra_body; the test that would have caught it still doesn't exist.
Jul 31, 2026 · 7 min
Trail history today is a weathered cast-aluminum plaque, a shallow official app, or nothing. TrailTold plays narrated history at the spot it happened, triggered by GPS as you walk. Here's what it is, how it's built, and exactly how far along it is.
Read more→Jul 31, 2026 · 8 min
I started an offline-first travel journal today. The interesting engineering bet is the sync layer: hand-rolled row sync with last-write-wins and visible conflict copies, not CRDTs. Here's the product, the design, and why the fancier option was the wrong one.
Read more→Jul 31, 2026 · 7 min
I expected the Astro 6 to 7 bump to bring Vite 6. It brought Vite 8, which bundles with Rolldown instead of esbuild, which resolves `@import "tailwindcss"` as a filesystem path. One ENOENT, one plugin swap, done.
Read more→Jul 31, 2026 · 6 min
A Dependabot major broke main on one of my repos while I wasn't looking. The fix is one workflow file that approves and auto-merges semver patches and does nothing at all for minors and majors. No allowlists, no version parsing, no cron.
Read more→Jul 31, 2026 · 8 min
TrailTold runs on Postgres with PostGIS, and there is no ST_DWithin anywhere in the backend. The "did the user enter this radius" decision is forty lines of pure Dart on the device. Here's why the spatial database doesn't do the spatial part.
Read more→Jun 5, 2026 · 6 min
The dotnet-native-interop POC was built around one swap-in seam — an ILanguageModel interface that the whole app streams through. This is the plan for what goes behind it: ONNX Runtime for on-device inference in .NET 10, why ONNX fits the NativeAOT/no-cloud constraints, and the toolchain risks that make on-device AI the last and hardest phase. Honest roadmap, with links to the seam and the design spec.
Read more→Jun 5, 2026 · 7 min
A deep technical design for running ONNX Runtime on-device behind the dotnet-native-interop swap-in seam: the exact embedding pipeline (tokenize → int64 tensors → InferenceSession → mean-pool → L2-normalize → cosine search), OrtValue zero-copy vs DenseTensor, SessionOptions and execution providers on mobile, and the NativeAOT trimming/native-linking gauntlet that makes this the riskiest phase. Real Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime C#.
Read more→Jun 5, 2026 · 6 min
Stripe Checkout completes. The user lands back on your site. Now what? The pattern almost nobody warns you about, and the 30-line endpoint that solves it.
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