Essays, reflections, learnings.
Four sync strategies, three operating systems, one stubborn vault. About four weekends lost to the kind of evenings that start with a thought and end in git reflog. The order I tried things in is also the order I was wrong in — and the punchline I refused to accept until the end.
Three categories of apps were eating my attention with notifications I couldn't selectively disable. Per-app settings are too coarse. What worked: routing notifications through a server that scores them on context and only interrupts above a threshold. The architecture, the scoring model, what it taught me about my own attention.
Two years of an n8n server running twenty-something workflows. Most worked. Most needed me to think about them. Turning it off and replacing it with a three-layer pattern running inside the chat tool I was already using — the model, the constraints that drove it, and why 'automation' was the wrong frame.
I opened ClickUp on a Tuesday night and 'tomorrow's work' had three items: two already done, one not mine. The lesson — the task tracker is the last thing to know — rearranged how I plan a week, and the four signals I now trust instead.
Most patterns for 'giving an agent memory' are retrieval over chat history. That's lookup, not memory. The four-markdown-file arrangement — AGENTS, SOUL, MEMORY, TOOLS — that turned a stateless responder into something with opinions, a workspace, and continuity across sessions. None of the files is clever; the arrangement is.
The pet-GPS company sold me ten days of battery; I get twenty-three hours. Not a device bug — a structural mismatch between a 2G-first tracker and a rural French village whose 2G coverage is being quietly disassembled. The four-paragraph version of my new respect for radio-physics.
For two weeks ScreenSearch captured my computer use; every night a different LLM summarised the day. The differences in what Mistral, Qwen, and Gemma each noticed told me more about the models than any benchmark — and one of them got uncomfortably good at calling me out.