Since implementing better, more professional harnesses and constraints around my agentic development and having Codex and Claude review each other's PR's, things feel very different. When you're in full YoLo vibecode mode, you think of an idea and it's on the page five minute later. But I'm trying to harness this stuff to build proper, functioning, robust, maintainable, coherent software. So I'm forgoing dopamine for quality. But it feels very different. I feel more like when I was a Product Manager frustrated at how long it takes to add a button to a form. Everything is slower now, but *I think* the quality is improving. It's less fun though. PR222: This stupid little PR with a tiny change has been a menace. I was starting to get really frustrated - it felt like the goalposts kept shifting and I ended up in this endless loop where this PR was blocking lost of other work, but I just couldn't coax it through the integrator (a harness that merges these changes). Somehow, we beat that motherfucker. Slow news day here
Thoughts
Short-form updates, long-form articles, and everything in between.
I've got an enormous amount to do and things feel in disarray, at the moment, but I'm doing a little bit of work while I watch one of my favourite childhood films: The Hunt for Red October. I have seen this movie so many times, I know almost every line of dialogue. I decided to watch today as I saw a Hunt for Red October movie production mini documentary that went into the production and how they made it. Thirty minutes later, I'm watching the real thing with a cup of coffee. I loved it at the time because (i) Sean Connery, Sam Neil, Alex Baldwin, Tim Curry (ii) Submarine movies are great (iii) There's something special about the pre-cgi movie era, and the pre golden age of TV streaming where every week's episode is bigger budget than a whole movie. The music and practical effects have a cinematic quality that you don't get these days, music and something about the production style of 80s and 90s style movies. It feels less big and visually spectacular than the same movie made today, but somehow more immersive as a story (iv) I find the cold war completely fascinating as a period of history. Although it feels less fascinating and more frightening living through Cold War II right now with the AI arms race and new geopolitical tensions. I think I've been on a bit of a Soviet Union neurodiverse deep dive after rewatching For All Mankind and the new spin off Star City. A few days ago, I fell down a YouTube hole learning about the development of the Soviet Typhoon class submarine (which is what The Red October was based on in the movie). https://youtu.be/2On_NsAcukk?si=82b8KPrSCFdmHYQJ I had just assumed that it was a big Russian submarine (with the fictional Caterpillar drive added for the movie). But it turns out it was a remarkably audacious thing of a completely different scale than the movie ever suggested. It mentions a few times that "she's big", even saying that she's bigger than the real life Typhoon. But the real Typhoon was really remarkable. It was designed to be able to hold the new generation of Soviet nuclear missiles, but these were physically more massive than anything deployed from a submarine before (16.1 m (52.8 ft) long and 84,000 kg (185,000 lb). Conventional thinking would be a big pressurised cylinder, but something large enough to accommodate two rows of these beasts would have been so massive that there would have been structural challenges that would likely have been insurmountable. Not to mention that it would have required a new set of facilities to build something like this. So they came up with a truly unconventional design: A catamaran wrapped in another hull; It was effectively two submarines built in parallel with two reactors and another hull wrapped around them. In between the two hulls were the two giant banks of the strategic nuclear missiles. Because the sub was so big and like a big brick moving through the water, the design meant it was going to be noisy... Which is the opposite of what you want when designing a submarine. But it turned out to be not as noisy as the size and scope should have made it: The Soviet designers extensively tested the shape of the hull using models in tanks to minimise backwash and turbulent eddies, cowled the props and mounted the machinery on floating beds / decoupled platforms to minimise vibrations. So it was quieter than it had any right to be, but still noisy. Consequently, it's operating model was that it would creep beneath Arctic ice rather than cruise in deep water where it would be harder to detect and punch through the ice when ordered to launch. The really wild stuff was probably not known at time of making the movie. The unconventional design of the two pressure hulls arranged as a catamaran with the missile bays in-between meant there was large voids of empty space that were unused. The Soviet leadership decided to make use of this space by implementing surprising crew comfort features. It had s swimming pool, a traditional sauna, daylight solarium, and even an arboretum with real plants inside. When the CIA started to see images of this being built, they couldn't quite believe the scope of what they were seeing. Apparently they struggled to get the book adapted into a movie as there was a feeling that the story might be too intricate for cinema going audiences of the early 90s. It's interesting how audiences were only trusted with simple plots, goodies & baddies, uncomplicated motives and relatively one dimensional archetypal characters. The movie has a few interesting directorial choices to make it easier for audiences to follow. One clever trick is that there are three submarines and each is given unique lighting and aesthetic to help the viewer not get lost. For example the Red October is full of chrome accents and blue lighting, while the American sub has a different aesthetic and red lighting accents. It's cleverly done in the movie and I'd never noticed it before. But I remember my Grandad declining to watch it with me in my teens because "it was a bit too involved". Apparently he found it too complex and didn't enjoy having to work so hard to enjoy a war movie. I also wonder if he found it complicated the protagonists being Russians? Either way - it was a big favourite of mine in my youth. I haven't watched it in years, partly because I don't watch as much classic man movies these days and actually I think what was too complicated a plot for the early 90s feels a little simple in 2026. I think the golden age of television has brought us shows with complex, nuanced multi dimensional characters, murky factions and no real sense of black and white in the stories we enjoy.
The dopamine is flowing with OpenAI Codex today. I've got Claude and Codex reviewing each other's work systematically and while progress seems slower than the heady days of any early project, it feels like every move is way more considered and the output is improving code quality. A lot of my current work is developing using frontier models to build applications and harnesses using self hosted LLMs and RAG. My next step is going to be to bring as much of the coding "in house" as possible.
To my friends (so I can avoid telling you all one at a time): Hannah and I have separated. We care about each other and we're not discussing details. No one's fault - we love eachother deeply and have a lot of chemistry, but just couldn't make it work. The separation has been amicable and conscious, but never the less completely heartbreaking. It feels devastating to lose your best friend and roadmap for a future (both for us and for me). I don't feel like it will be ok, but know it will.
This evening we rented bikes and cycled into Amsterdam. It was about 12km in, but pretty flat, so we did it in about 35 minutes. When we got there we were both hungry so decided to grab a bite to eat and get a drink. We picked a random cafe. Hannah had her (not at all surprising) order of Fish and Chips and I had the worst steak I've ever ordered. After dinner we did a boat tour around the canals. I was hoping for one with some more narration, but we ended up on one that was more silly and boozy with minimal tour guide stuff. It was still fun, but I think I was after a little more mental nutrition especially since neither of us are drinking alcohol right now. Before heading back to Ripley, we took a detour to a coffee shop to pick up some supplies for the weekend. The cycle back was fun, but probably twice as far as we wanted given it was dark and cooling fast. Overall a really fun evening in Amsterdam
We went for a little explore. There is a cool park just nearby with interesting scupltures, kids play activities, great trees and interesting landscaping.
We've arrived at a camper park about 12km outside Amsterdam. It's clean and well maintained, but a bit souless. I suppose that's what is actually useful here - it's a place to put one's van when visiting Amsterdam rather than an idyllic wilderness retreat. In the evening, we got the Metro into Amsterdam and wandered around looking at the city together. Our energy levels were low, so it wasn't a huge expedition, and after a bit of walking around, we found a really wonderful Italian restaurant called Santi & Santini (https://www.santiesantini.com). It was a 4.8 on google reviews and it was well deserved. We both had the Orecchiette al sugo di carne (Orecchiette, beef stew slow cooked for 8 hours in tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, celery, carrots, onion, laurer, red wine) - and it was really awesome comfort food - just what we both needed. Then, because it was late and we were tired, we treated ourselves to an Uber back to Ripley.
As part of our slow trip back to the UK, we're staying at a campsite near Eindhoven for a few days. This sunny Sunday, we went for a gorgeous walk in the nature around the area. There's a really nice lake nearby which we walked around. And I got to enjoy Hannah being excited at looking at animals.
Some more renders of the potential product
ELS Effigy happened early at 5pm. - It felt a bit weird it happening in the bright sun. But also the warmth made it feel a bit like being at Nowhere. Another strange dynamic is that it was open to the public, so there were loads of families and non burners there. It's obviously good to share our ceremonies and traditions with default world people, and the atmosphere was nice, but I think I'd have preferred something a little more intimate given I'd struggled to integrate with the ELS crowd as much as I'd have liked. Incredibly, my co-director of Burning Nest, Jeanne and I hadn't connected at the event prior to Effigy, but we found each other and got the obligatory selfie for the board Signal chat.
My friend Ben (and their partner, Ali) run an art project at Burning Nest called Troll Bar. There has been a Troll takeover at ELS.
I really like these posters for the Ten Principles of Burning Man.
The mornings at ELS appear to be conference style auditorium speaker slots. The event opened with the Burning Man CEO, Marian Goodell, giving a talk. I found it pretty alienating as the language was very much reinforcing their views that real burning happened at Burning Man and the regionals were like burning for kids who haven't graduated to the real thing yet. One line was "and there are some of you here that have never even been to Black Rock City - you should be so proud carrying on the culture without having experienced it". I've got so little interest in Burning Man - it seems so corporate and culty. And the American Burner scene seems so different to the Euroburner crowd. I honestly think they need to be looking to the regionals for culture & ideas. The fundamental problem is they see us as children rather than siblings. This trend carried on during the deep dive sessions where Burning Man type humans seemed to be saying that the reason that problem x existed at a regional is that as a younger event, they've not had time to implement Burning Man infrastructure / processes - but had an obliviousness that we actually want to do things our own way and sometimes explicitly differently. Our group was focused on "How to establish rules for acceptable behaviour (while allowing people to be free and self express, etc)". We got into interesting discussions about Implicit rules vs Explicit rules: Culture vs Values vs Guidelines vs Rules and how they interact.
Arrived at ELS! Ripley parked up at the venue with 3 or 4 other campers.
Morning coffee, watching the cows go by We just slept our first night in Ripley being able to share a bed at a farm just outside Nijmegen, Netherlands. The new side pods make a huge difference. I'm 5'11" / 184cm and was able to sleep all the way across the bed. Before fitting them, I had to sleep diagonally across the bed and Han would sleep on the sofa.
We arrived at the ferry. There was minimal departure fuss and we boarded straight away. We had a quick supper and then settled down in our lovely cabin. First time I've had a double bed on a ferry. Hannah was very excited about what a cute little room it was.
Disaster! We've spent the day cleaning every inch of Ripley, repacked every crate and stowed the garage neatly... We were leaving for the Ferry, just a couple of minutes late, but nothing bad. I pulled out of the driveway and, out of habit, turned as though I was in my car and not a 6.5m van. I swung into the gate post and heard a sickening crunch. The door is badly damaged and will almost certainly need replacing and repainting. So that's £2000 gone. On the plus side - new paint.
New 10" rack in place. From bottom to top: - Cat 6A Patch Panel - Unifi Flex 2.5G POE Switch - Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber - Adtran XGS-PON (Fiber Modem) - GL.Inet POE KVM - Mac Studio (AI Lab) - Philips Hue Hub / Gateway Sad that the rack mount housing for my Mac Studio and the KVM haven't shown up yet, but it is now nice and neatly set up. The Mac Studio won't stay here forever, but is just going to sit here while my house is being finished and it can move into my home lab. The patch panel connects to the first wired access point a Unifi Pro 7 - But there's still 3 or 4 more to wire in over the next month or so
Unifi Flex 2.5G POE Switch doesn't come with a power supply?!? I get that in 2026, phone companies have decided not to ship chargers, nominally to prevent e-waste. And I get that this switch could be powered by PoE, so maybe some people don't need the power adapter... But not including power for this switch felt really cheap and shitty. It's not like it is even USB C powered - It needs a proprietary DC power supply for another £70 / $90. I think if there had been an AC bundle (that cost more) and a PoE option without the power supply, I'd be feeling less angry, but it feels annoying to now have to source the power supply mid project, because it feels like they were being sneaky with not mentioning in a very visible way that there was no power adapter. The only mention is the little tool tip buried in the product spec. To be fair, I could have clicked on "what's in the box", but it just never occurred to me that power would be optional.
The cupboards had a high lip in front of them meaning that any items stored inside, aren't visible to anyone under about 2m in height. In the food cupboard, this is bad as you can miss stuff that is there for eating and end up wasting stuff. In the other cupboards, you can find yourself fishing around in the bottom trying to find the thing. While she was in at Scandivans, we asked them to help solve the problem. They cut out a template and used the router to create this nice curved lip. It's now much easier to see what's in there and get things with minimal frustration.