Ai

claude-compass — working notes

Notes on my rule-based guard for Claude Code: the hook contract, the Python/Go pair, the shared test set, and the holes I found along the way.

the robot holding up a page of boxes and arrows while the boy in the cap, hand on his chin and frowning, marks a correction on it with a red pen — the only colour in the drawing

The Coding Skill That Actually Degrades Isn't Syntax — It's Judgment

Everyone worries that coding with an LLM makes them forget how to code. That’s the wrong thing to worry about. The skill that really degrades is judgment — knowing when to trust the model and when to take the keyboard back.

the boy in the cap leaning over a network diagram spread on a table with a magnifying glass, while the robot beside him points at one box on the map — the two of them auditing the layout together

🧱 An Agent Audited My Homelab — and the Useful Part Was Telling It 'No'

I gave a second AI read access to the Git repos that define my k3s homelab. The findings were fine — the work was validating each: which to accept, which to recalibrate, and which the scanner was confidently wrong about.

two robots standing on either side of an easel holding a blank page layout — the familiar round-headed robot gesturing at the design, and a square-headed robot with a flat unimpressed expression holding a clipboard

I Let Two AIs Argue Over My Homepage — To See If They Actually Think Differently

A single model playing scrum master is just one mind doing all the voices. So I gave two models from two different labs the same deliberately vague design brief, let them collide, and watched what each one refused to give up. I wasn’t trying to prove the merge was better — I was trying to prove they were different.

the robot standing at an easel drawing a picture of itself on the canvas, holding a blank scroll in its other hand, while the boy in the cap watches holding a paintbrush

🎨 I Gave My Blog a Mascot and Never Drew a Line

Thirty posts, no covers, and I can’t draw. The fix wasn’t a better prompt — it was picking the right model tier and letting the model read the whole post.

the boy in the cap with a small bird perched on his shoulder, holding up a card showing a single anonymous person icon

The Third Bird Reads People, Not Pages — and Never Hits Send

Two birds already read the web for me. The third one reads people — it mines my GitHub graph for humans worth a first message and writes the opening line, but it never sends. The word that changed the whole design was ‘who’, and the trap it had to dodge is that finding people like me is exactly the easy thing embeddings do best.

the boy in the cap holding up a tablet showing a browser window with a globe on it, two small birds perched together on his shoulder

Two Birds That Read the Web for Me: One Hoards, One Scatters

I gave my second brain two agents that read the outside world and collide it against my notes. A Magpie watches my GitHub stars and only speaks when something hits live work. A Blue Jay reads a handful of RSS feeds and surfaces the distant, not-yet-relevant connection. They share a security spine — and they have deliberately opposite jobs. Here’s why the split is the whole design.

the robot holding out a net bag stuffed with a tangle of gears, springs, cables and odds and ends, while the boy in the cap frowns at it through a magnifying glass

I Added a Knowledge Graph to My Search. It Made It Worse.

My second brain searches over a vault of markdown using BM25 + vectors + graph expansion. I’d been telling people the graph improved recall. Then I finally benchmarked it, and plain keyword search beat my fancy hybrid — the graph was actively dragging the right answers out of the results. Here’s the scorecard and what it taught me about where graphs actually belong.

the robot and the boy in the cap together holding up a single ballot slip marked with a question mark and YES / NO checkboxes, while behind them a dense tangle of scribbled documents is knotted into a scribble; a gear floats above the robot's head

VoteWatch: How Your Representatives Voted — and Whether You'd Agree

Parliamentary roll-call votes are public, machine-readable, and almost completely unread. I built a thing that scrapes them, distills each decision into one plain-language question, shows which party voted which way, and lets you register whether you agree — then puts your answer next to how parliament actually voted. The rule that keeps it honest: the AI writes the summary, but it never decides a fact.

the robot and the boy in the cap standing in front of a large clock face full of gears, each of them fitting a small gear-block into it from opposite sides

Veracracy: The Question We Forget to Ask When We Govern

I built a clock that counts down to a form of government that doesn’t exist yet — legitimacy grounded in verified knowledge rather than power, wealth, or whoever shouts loudest. The only reason I’m not embarrassed to have built it: the clock can run backward, the assumption behind it is published in plain sight, and the first concrete brick already ships real parliamentary data. A measurement, not a prophecy.