git log --oneline blog/
# blog
// real gotchas from real repos, not posts for the sake of posting.
The Eighteen-Month Engineer
A decade of short stints reads as instability until you see the clock underneath it: a brain wired for novelty does its best work at the start of things and runs out of road on solved problems — and the hiring filter double-taxes exactly that profile.
The Tools Are the Brain
Getting diagnosed with ADHD late, and realizing every tool I'd built — Wizard, Forge, Wand, Ritual — was externalized cognition all along: push-not-pull systems that arrive instead of waiting to be visited.
I built a Neovim plugin that physically won't let me skip a break
The forced-break Pomodoro system in Wand.nvim, and an undo-corrupting file write an AI code review caught inside it.
Neither Home Nor Riverbank
On staffing/consulting work, an old Hindi idiom about a washerman's dog, and the specific moment you realize nobody in the chain actually owns your career.
Getting Neovim under 100ms wasn't one trick
Wand.nvim's boot-time target comes from making lazy-loading the default everywhere, not from a single clever optimization.
Why I didn't let an LLM decide what to work on next
Wizard's work-triage scorer is a weighted sum, not a model call. The LLM only writes the sentence explaining the ranking, it doesn't produce it.
I shipped a token-saving format, then ripped it back out
A CSV-based compact encoding for AI agent memory saved ~40% tokens on paper. It broke local LLM parsing in practice, so I reverted it.