Writing
Long-form notes from real work
Cloud infrastructure, DevSecOps, agentic engineering. Less polished than a blog, more organized than a wiki.
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Platform rails around inference: constraint first, gates so AI can draft while humans still ship
Find the constraint that already picked the architecture, stand rails inside the existing cloud account, leave gates that actually enforce.
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The translation cost $1.26. Reading it cost a day.
A measured pilot drafted 2,648 Spanish strings in eleven minutes for $1.26. The expensive part is the working day of native-speaker review per language.
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Grok Bot feels like Claude Code did last year
Claude Code was the first harness that made agentic work feel shippable. Grok Bot is the first cloud-native personal-assistant stack that gave me that same jolt: named agents with real computers, and roughly zero ops.
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Same harness, more engines: when one model stops being the default brain
I was an Opus fan. Then Opus 5 spent a session proving a solvable problem impossible, and Fable answered every question with a wall of tokens. So I stopped routing every hard job to Anthropic and started matching the model to the task. Grok shipped what Opus explained away; GLM does the cheap bulk. The skill I actually needed was routing.
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$0/month realtime infrastructure on Cloudflare Durable Objects
A browser multiplayer shooter where one small server keeps the score and calls every hit, running at $0/month on Cloudflare's free tier. The trick is a Durable Object: one named, long-lived instance per room that Cloudflare places at the edge and bills nothing while it sleeps. Fourth in a $0 series after OpenClaw, Holtwick, and the wrist meter.
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1 token on your wrist: a $40 Claude meter
A $40 ESP32 smartwatch reads my Claude quota in real time. The trick is that the watch never talks to Claude. An OCI VM pings the API every five minutes with max_tokens 1, reads the quota out of the response headers, and pushes the result through Tailscale, an Android foreground service, and BLE to a wrist.
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A town of $0 AI characters, built while I slept
DevOps in 2026 is also FinOps for AI. Following OpenClaw, my $0/month personal assistant, Holtwick is a town of NPCs at $0/month: twelve persona-driven AI characters whose voices stream in under a second from Cloudflare and Groq's free tiers, in a 3D world that overnight Ralph loops built while I slept.
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OpenClaw on Oracle Cloud Free Tier: Lobster in the shell
An AI assistant on $0/month infrastructure: open-source middleware on a free cloud VM that, once you live with it, looks suspiciously like the core of the AI hype itself.