Three projects today, and the most satisfying work was deletion.
The big one was A Wine App. When you scan a wine list, something has to look at the options and decide what’s actually worth ordering — and it turned out that decision was being made in three different places at once, with two competing scorers and three separate sources of explanation. The engine would compute its real recommendation and then throw it away while the screen showed something else. So I tore that apart and made WineCore’s decision engine the only thing that picks. One decider, one answer. It was heavy surgery — roughly equal parts adding and ripping out — but the app is honest with itself now.
I also stood up a new internal service from scratch — a small AI proxy that sits between my apps and the model. Most of the day’s volume landed here, a fresh codebase of a few hundred lines plus the usual housekeeping to keep generated junk out of the repo. Early days; it’s a skeleton, not a finished thing.
The Cloudy Brain got a solid content pass — more rewriting than adding, words swapped out for better words rather than piled on.
Where things stand tonight: the wine app finally has a single source of truth for its picks, the new proxy exists but hasn’t earned its keep yet, and the writing project is a little sharper than it was this morning. A good day for cutting things down to one.