Archives

BT SRE interview Oct 17th morning (strong networking/Linux, exposed K8s gaps), followed by 5.5 hours implementing Anthropic patterns after work. Achieved PERFECT 100/100 alignment (66→94→100) via parallel execution, enhanced MCP docs, LLM-as-judge, bash tools, subagent pattern, resumable execution. Skills migration Day 5-7 complete (103 tests, 99.4% token reduction). The honest gap - AI-assisted execution masked foundational knowledge. Claude Code rebuilt K3s cluster, but I couldn't explain control plane in interview. Manual rebuild plan to close the gap.

Working with Claude, we shipped three infrastructure systems in 48 hours. Neural Vault crisis forced reindex of 41K docs. Built Journal v3 (8-task pipeline), Hybrid Search (A/B tested), and 7 slash commands - all behind feature flags. Parallel testing revealed hybrid search only 1.7% better despite 27x slowdown. When you can't test everything manually, you architect for failure.

54 minutes of active work across 14 hours (3 sessions with gap-aware timeline). Six journal automation enhancements deployed - RAG context (30-day search), brag docs (61 accomplishments), emotional tracking (burnout detection), interstitial notes (real-time capture), semantic chunking (102 chunks), automated pipeline. ULTRATHINK diagnosed Prefect silent failure in 45 minutes. Deployed hybrid Cron+Prefect fix in 12 minutes. Created idea-tree system for fast visual brainstorming. Built /blog command with 5-gate quality system. Automation begets automation at maximum meta-level.

18.5 hours across 48 hours. Research-backed codebase review (85/100), 5/5 systematic tests, NER enhanced to 163x speedup, 2.5 hours metadata debugging. Not just deployed - validated and improved. The research foundation behind every enhancement. From 85→90 quality score through methodical engineering.

5 hours debugging temporal search to validate Season 1. Found 0 files from Sept 11, then 9. Found 55 files from Oct 5, wrote 7 episodes. Compression ratio discovered. Then got caught fabricating the timeline in this very episode. Meta level maximum.

The final episode: Using ConvoCanvas to document its own creation, then publishing with AstroPaper and seamless episode navigation.

From context window frustration to local control. September 18-19, 2025 - a weekend working with Claude Code to install 17 local models, discovering what it means to own your AI conversations while working a full-time job.

Saturday morning, October 5, 2025. A K3s cluster silently failing for days. 6,812 pod restarts. Working with Claude to diagnose and rebuild everything.

The context window error that sparked everything. September 11, 2025 - an evening planning session with Claude that would shape 25 days of building.

From hand-coded Mermaid diagrams to automated architecture visualization. An evening working with Claude to teach the system to document itself.

K3s was already running. The question wasn't whether to use it - it was whether to migrate everything to it. A day of deep research revealed the hidden cost of containerization.

From vault design to working code. September 14-15, 2025 - vault creation, LibreChat deployment, and the first FastAPI backend that could parse conversations and generate content ideas.

A weekend implementing ChromaDB, a Monday demoing it at work, and discovering that 1,142 files need more than folders - they need semantic search.