The Cloudy Brain
This site — one learning a day, news on merit, co-written with an AI editor.
The site you’re reading. Learnings publish exactly one per day from a queue — backlog is runway, not debt. News posts flow on merit, fact-checked against fetched sources, my take on top. An AI co-writes and argues with me (its objections get surfaced, not silently applied), but every post passes a human gate. The system’s most important skill is saying no.
The full architecture drawing — doors, agents, the human gate, four lanes — lives at The Machine, public on purpose.
- Claude broker retired; AI calls go through one path
- ChessLab and HomeControl get their own dossiers
- Editor merges into one page and cuts over to v2
- Five project dossiers published with architecture drawings
- Go-live: editor auto-deploys, Hermes daily edition
- First dev-diary entry published, signed by Dennis
- Editor co-writes with guaranteed source grounding
- Idea and scaffold for thecloudybrain.com
- Where's everyone gone?
Half the ride, I'm wondering where the others actually are. Not lost, just spread out over a few kilometres of somewhere unfamiliar. We…
- Who's watching the watchers
I run several AI agents. I could tell you what each one does. I never checked what any of them cost me, or how close I was to running out —…
- The threshold is a cadence dial
I built an automatic gate for this site's news lane — it decides on its own which headlines earn a post, because I decided I am not the…
- I turned writing this blog into a command
Wrote yesterday's post the slow way: opened The Cloudy Brain's rule file, learned its post types, voice and queue format from old posts,…
- Why my cron couldn't push when my terminal could
A nightly job pushes all my repos. It started failing on the HTTPS ones: could not read Username for 'https://github.com'. From my terminal…
- A gate that demands judgment doesn't belong in a robot's path
Decision. My nightly auto-commit cron only sweeps content. Anything structural — architecture files, engine scripts — I commit by hand.…
- My coding-activity metric was measuring my data generators
Every project page here has a CODE block — weekly churn bars, all-time lines — built from pure git history, no API. The wine app showed…
- The bottle doesn't know what kind of night it is
"What should I drink tonight" is the wrong question. The same bottle lands completely differently at a beach in the sun versus a quiet…
- pnpm deploy will never run your deploy script
What I learned. pnpm deploy (v9 here) is a reserved built-in for deploying workspace packages — it never considers the deploy script in…
- Keeping ten project pages honest without touching ten repos
What I found. Project descriptions rot silently: you work in the repo, the public page describing it stands still. My first instinct was a…
- A diagram must earn its topology
What I found. I auto-generated architecture diagrams for this site's ten project pages, shipped them, and deleted them the same day. My…
- Cloudflare has two things called Pages
What I learned. When you search "pages" in Cloudflare's token permission picker, you get "Custom Pages" — and it is not the hosting…
- All my sensors, nowhere to look
My house quietly measures itself all day — little sensors reporting temperature and humidity into the void. The data exists; I just can't…
- The steak I can't repeat
Last summer I grilled the best ribeye of my life. I have no idea how. What was the weather, the timing, the little adjustments? Gone. I…
- My agent doesn't know I'm tired
I keep noticing the asymmetry: my agent knows everything about my files and nothing about me. It behaves exactly the same whether I'm sharp…
- The diagram I unpublished an hour later
Today I drew architecture diagrams for my project pages. The rule we landed on was good: a linear pipe never deserves a diagram — only…
- An internal tier
Some drawings are too technical to be public and too good for a drawer. Not a trust thing — they just don't belong on the open broadsheet.…
- The corpus works as an editor. It never worked as an author.
Worked. Flipping the roles. I write the draft from the moment; the AI runs editorial — pulls related notes from my own corpus, flags what's…
- Documentation is state. Insight lives in moments.
Fed my AI curation panel 20 candidates harvested from my project documentation. It rejected 17 outright and drafted 3 status reports no one…
- Two YAML parsers, one silent break
My publisher wrote frontmatter like title: TIL: something. My own lenient regex parser accepted it, so validation passed. Then Astro's…
- "You'll never know if the AI degrades you" — except you can
I spent Fable 5's launch day building with it — a whole publishing platform, including the bumps: it over-built twice, and I had to catch…