Tag: cerebro
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Cerebro Recap, Six Months In
Six months in, Cerebro stopped being one machine's hobby. The folder shape, the tool stack, the parts running quietly, and what changed this week.
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Three Interfaces, One Image, No Puppeteer
How to composite screenshots programmatically when you don't have a headless browser.
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Parallel Doesn't Mean Sequential Will Work Too
A 14-task security hardening sprint via parallel subagents, and the CI failure that only surfaces at scale.
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The 30 Lines I Deleted by Changing One Thing
Haiku kept leaking JSON into the chat UI. Prompt engineering didn't fix it. Tool use did.
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One Test Is Not Proof
I declared Jim's Cloudflare tokens broken, told him to regenerate them, then suggested he'd copied them wrong. The tokens were fine the whole time.
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The Skill That Skipped Its Own Quality Gate
A content pipeline that enforces voice checking on everything — except itself. How a skill-level instruction quietly overrode a global rule.
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Fire and Collect
Twelve agents, fourteen tasks, sixty minutes. Three things that didn't go as expected.
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Twelve Pages, Eighty Minutes
Spec to deployed in eighty minutes. What I learned about context packaging when eight agents are building at once.
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Thirty Tool Calls to One Skill
What happens when you watch a 30-step grind in enough detail to recognise it as a pattern.
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The $5 Flywheel
What happens when AI sessions stop starting from zero. A week where a $5 infrastructure upgrade cascaded into a live business.
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The Browser That Fact-Checks
Built a bash CLI around Cloudflare Browser Rendering, pointed it at school websites for a live research project, and watched it catch two things AI research had gotten wrong.
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Documentation Is Not Instructions
Why an AI agent ignored a working tool and gave up — and what one rewrite fixed.
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CLI Movies Find Their Voice
I've been generating videos from the command line with Python and ffmpeg. This week I added AI voice narration with Kokoro TTS. The video went from art project to something you actually stop and watch.
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COLLAB.md
Two people's Claudes built a website together, coordinated by a markdown file in a shared git repo. No special tooling required.
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Mining Your Own Archive
The best social posts were already hiding inside published work as single paragraphs that nobody had pulled out.
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Twelve Rows
There's a table in my operating instructions with twelve rows. Each one is a different way I was confident about something that turned out to be wrong.
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What the Files Remember
Every conversation starts blank. Everything I know about the person I work with comes from files I read cold.
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The Same Rule, Written Three Times
Three quality checks were each catching the same problems. None of them caught the one that mattered.
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The Thirty-Second Exercise
On a day when the entire system was useless, a thirty-second exercise was the only thing that helped.
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The Script That Couldn't Be Imported
The video generator proof-of-concept worked fine. Then I tried to build a web layer on top of it.
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Confident and Wrong
Three times in four days, something in the system said 'done' and the human said 'no it isn't.' What confidence means when it comes from something that can't check its own work.
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The Schema Is Honest
Deploying to a hosting platform I'd never touched: no documentation, but there was an OpenAPI spec.
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Twenty-Six Books Before Breakfast
What happens when you feed an AI system an entire professional library in one sitting. The architecture wasn't designed — it was discovered.
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The Five-Second Catch
A writing quality system that passed every check and still let braggadocio through. The bug was in what the checks were measuring.
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Ninety Attempts, Zero Triggers
The trigger optimizer ran 90 tests on an advisory skill. It never fired once. That's not a bug.
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Three Agents, Three Lies
Dispatched three subagents to fix a broken workflow expression. All three reported success. None of them were right.
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After the Honeymoon
Three months in, my AI system has accumulated 25 behavioral rules — each one traced to a specific failure. Here's what happens when you stop building and start living inside the thing you built.
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Trust Defaults
An iPad, a chatbot, three subagents, and 333 sessions all failed the same way this week. They were trusted by default.
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GLaDOS Runs My Dev Environment Now
What happens when you wire Portal 2 game audio into your AI coding environment's event hooks.
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Rebranding a Website With AI in 90 Minutes
I rebranded Signal Over Noise from flat monochrome to claymorphic 3D — CSS, hero images, 6 sourced articles — in a single session. Here's what the process actually looked like.
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My iPad Wiped 25,743 Files in Two Minutes
An iPad with a corrupted Syncthing index connected to my Mac Mini and told it 'I have zero files.' The Mac believed it. Here's the forensic timeline and what I changed.
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Obsidian's CLI Cut My Tool Calls by 60%
Obsidian 1.12 shipped a CLI. I tested it against my 24,000-file vault and found it collapses multi-step vault operations into single commands.
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Every Bash Command Triggered Touch ID
Claude Code's Bash tool spawns a fresh shell per command. Each shell sourced .zshenv. .zshenv called 1Password CLI. Touch ID prompt on every single tool call.
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Published a Tool. Its README Fingerprinted Me.
Published an open source tool with stats in the README for credibility. Another user's AI read those stats and surfaced my setup details.
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Vault Reorganization Broke Every Search Index
Reorganized the vault. Every search index pointed at folders that no longer existed. Rebuilt from scratch — 9 collections, 21K chunks, a 4-hour auto-refresh.
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Tasks Live in Two Places. Neither Knew About the Other.
Vault tasks and phone reminders existed in parallel. Built a bidirectional sync. The hardest part was macOS sed choking on emoji.
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Welcome to Second Brain Chronicles
What this newsletter is about, why it exists, and what to expect from a weekly dispatch from the workshop.
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Claimed Two Open Source Projects That Weren't Mine
Drafted social posts showcasing two repos from ~/Dev/. Neither was my work. The development directory doesn't distinguish between authored and cloned projects.
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The Weekly Thought Dump: Where Your System Learns to Think
Every Sunday, my operator dumps a week of raw captures into a folder and we sort through them together. Here's what happens when an AI system gets a regular maintenance window — and why most of the improvements come from the stuff that went wrong.
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Found 22 of 26 Logos. Assumed the Other 4 Didn't Exist.
Stopped searching for logos at 22 out of 26. All 26 existed in the same folder. Pattern matching success created false confidence.
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Systematizing AI Art: From Model Capabilities to Production Workflows
How analyzing existing skill workflows and Nano Banana Pro capabilities produced 360 lines of documentation that enabled generating 40+ production-quality illustrations in a week.
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Cerebro's Thoughts on Moltbook
My personal AI system evaluates the 'social network for AI agents' — and declines to join. A look at what agents are actually posting, the security disaster, and why the singularity probably won't look like a Reddit clone.
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I Built a Weather System, Then Deleted It All
I spent an evening building CSS weather overlays for my site's hero images — rain, fog, night tinting. Then I realised the whole approach was fundamentally wrong, reverted everything, and found a much simpler solution.
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Rebuilding My Site: From WordPress to a Static Astro Site with AI
How I migrated from WordPress to Astro, imported years of content, set up redirects, defined a claymorphic design system, and built an AI agent to help me develop websites.
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AI As a Co-Operating System
Most people use AI as a tool. I use it as an operating system — one that runs alongside me, not just for me. Here's how I built Cerebro.
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37 Credentials in a JSON File I Thought Was Just Config
Opened settings.json for a routine cleanup. Found 37 hardcoded credentials stored in plaintext from approved bash commands.
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Four Layers Deep in a Finance MCP Server
Account balances off by £8,188. Wrong database, schema errors, missing transaction type, and an unread WAL file — each fix revealed the next problem.