Last week I shared my knowledge base tool, agentkb. This week I am OSSing my pi harness that uses it, Harpy. The most interesting part of the harness is that knowledge base <-> harness integration so that's what this week post dives into. It covers what RLM is, how it drives a python loop with state, how Pi (typscript) extension talks to python, and how that allows for smart delegation and fan-out to smaller models to give more accurate search results. How My RLM Tool Works An LLM writes...
22 days ago • 9 min read
Hey, This was a week of context switching 😅. Product release weeks are always odd. The goal is super specific, and yet the work is scattered small tasks (testing, polish, docs, marketing copy, etc.). We shipped the stoa beta, and I kept wishing my agents could remember more. That's why I'm open sourcing `agentkb`, my work-in-progress knowledge base framework today. The Pi harness built around it will be open sourced next. AgentKB: A Local Knowledge Base for Agents My agent should learn from...
29 days ago • 6 min read
I'm open-sourcing my personal writing app, Raw2Draft. It's the first of several tools I'll be releasing over the coming months. Next is the knowledge base framework I use. Then an agent harness setup build on top of Pi (if it goes well). Personal tools have gotten cheap to build. Tools that work exactly how you think. Should you use mine? Probably not. It wasn't designed for you. But if writing is part of what you do, you should consider building your own. Point your agent at this repo (and...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey all, I spent the week working on concurrency issues. It was a good reminder that at scale, you have to understand the details of how things work. Everyone "knows" this, but with agents, it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you deeply understand what you've built. That the foundation is stronger than it really is. So today's post is about the problem called Cognitive Debt. Next week(ish) will be a write-up on the architecture and design for my personal text editor/writing tool. It's a...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Two new posts today. Oh, and we went out to get my wife new hairspray. It turned out the store is next to a petsmart. So now we have a cat. The first post is AI Coding Patterns 1: Vibe Coding. This is the first of an 18 post series on AI Coding. The series will build from here into more deliberate patterns and pitfalls The second (subscriber only) is My AI Writing Process. People ask me about this constantly. Few people talk about their AI writing process publicly, so I wanted to share mine....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey this is Isaac, This week has been about closing loops. I'm releasing the DevRelifier (product for helping share and promote tech stuff), which means dealing with the unsexy parts of software development: tax setup and final testing. It’s less about coding creative features and more about ensuring the business actually works without breaking the law or the user experience. If you want to try the product, reply to this email for more info and free credits. The Build: The Unsexy Last Mile...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Hey this is Isaac, I met with some dear friends, Danny and Audrey Roy Greenfeld, in Baltimore for a mini-sprint on the air web-dev framework. Walking around a science museum while brainstorming and cafe-hopping while hacking together was a blast. During the sprint I created a new testing example (unit, integration, and end-to-end playwright tests) and began extracting features from private codebases into small, public libraries. I also learned that a late evening espresso martini is not the...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Hey this is Isaac, This week I was fixing some basic and classic async problems: a "processing" pill that never updated to "complete." Blech. The goal is to prevent long-running tasks from freezing the user interface. If something takes a second, it’s fine to expect the user to stay on the page until it completes. But if it takes 5 minutes? Users will want to be able to do other things while it’s processing. So we have background tasks that run independently of the UI the user sees. But the...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Hey this is Isaac, Welcome to my new weekly newsletter. Each week, we explore one build, one lesson, and one refactor. Only practical ideas to help you build better. This week I jumped from untangling a messy Stripe integration to light creativity generating an AI promo video. The mental whiplash is real. Let's start with the AI Promo Video. The Build: Directing an AI to Make a Promo Video I created a 74-second promo video draft in about 30 minutes. AI wrote the code, but I was the creative...
7 months ago • 2 min read