2026-10-05 What happened I added scc to the deploy pipeline for Curiate so I could watch the codebase grow over time. scc counts lines of code, and if you leave it on its defaults it also prints a cost estimate at the bottom. This is what it printed: Total 531 files 81,674 lines 66,699 code Estimated Cost to Develop (organic)…

2026-09-25 What happened text-to-cad is the popular way to get an AI agent to do CAD right now: about 16k stars in five months, MIT licensed, and a bundle of thirteen agent skills (CAD, a viewer, DfAM checks, drawings, URDF, G-code, and more) on top of a Python package called cadgen. My own actuator work runs on a smaller, homegrown…

2026-09-19 What happened I have a gallery show built in TiXL, and it was hard to hand off. Keeping it running meant keeping TiXL running on my Mac laptop, the only machine with enough GPU to render the patch and push it out over NDI, and nobody else could host that. The obvious fix was to render everything to video…

2026-09-16 What happened I'm about to start designing a hardware groovebox, and before drawing a single schematic I wanted to read through something in the same shape that actually shipped. Randomwaves released their Drumboy Pro as open hardware under MIT: full KiCad, full firmware, the enclosure, and a reference SD card. It's a 10-layer sampler with a sequencer and an…

2026-09-08 What happened I wanted to move my Elecrow ThinkNode M5 off Meshtastic and onto MeshCore . Every guide I found said to "put the device in bootloader mode" first, and I couldn't. No double-tap-reset trick worked, no USB drive appeared, nothing. It turned out I was chasing a mode that doesn't exist on this board, and the actual blocker…

2026-09-02 What happened I wanted to do AI image generation and inpainting without leaving GIMP, so I wired up gimp-comfy-tools — a GIMP 3.0 plugin suite that talks to a local ComfyUI server over its REST + WebSocket API. It opens a "ComfyUI Studio" panel inside GIMP where you type a prompt, pick a checkpoint, and the result comes back…

2026-03-30 What happened I got tired of clicking around in Ableton to build up song arrangements, so I built a way to describe a full multi-track song in a plain JSON file and push it into Live with a Python script. The format has a clip library (define a MIDI loop once, reuse it anywhere), tracks with instrument URIs, and…

2026-03-30 What happened The AbletonMCP remote script is great for session view work but had no arrangement support at all. I forked it and added the commands I needed: copy_clip_to_arrangement , get_arrangement_clips , set_clip_loop , and a few others. The tricky part wasn't the commands themselves — it was a sequencing constraint in the Live API: duplicate_clip_to_arrangement() uses the session…

2026-03-30 What happened The push side worked well, but to make this genuinely useful I needed to be able to read a session back out too — so you can pull what's in Ableton, edit the JSON (manually or with an LLM), and push changes back. The first version of pull_song.py read from the session view using scene names and…

AI Answers Every once in a while I ask myself a pretty general overview question. Normally I poke around the programming subreddit or maybe look on Stack Overflow. AI has been kind of useful for not making any real decision but just summarizing the internet zeitgeist the same way I would doing initial discovery. I still read what AI gives…