Hub
Articles
Longer-form essays and thinking, published from the hub.
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What I Found Building My Own Claude Alternative After the Context Window Waste
When my Claude bill hit $847 in a single month, I started questioning everything I thought I knew about context windows. I'd been running the same content analysis workload for weeks, so either my usage had quietly exploded, or something fundamental about how I was approaching these large language models was wrong. The Discovery Phase My use case seemed straightforward: analyzing recurring document types in a content pipeline. Legal contracts, research papers, technical specifications — docum
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What I Found Building My Own IndieWeb Stack After 165 Points
I'd been lurking in IndieWeb discussions for months, accumulating karma points and bookmarking posts about data ownership and platform independence. But there was something absurd about consuming all this content about digital autonomy while still depending entirely on centralized platforms for discovery and engagement. After hitting 165 points debating the merits of webmentions versus traditional social media, I realized I was theorizing about building instead of actually building. So I stoppe
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Running 24/7 Local AI on Hardware I Control: What This Solo Builder's Setup Taught Me
I've been running persistent AI models on local hardware for about six months now, following Alex Finn's approach to local AI infrastructure. What started as curiosity about reducing API costs turned into something more fundamental — I realized I wasn't just optimizing for cheaper inference. I was building on entirely different foundations. The shift happened when I stopped thinking about AI as a service I call and started treating it as infrastructure I own. That change in perspective unlocked
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What I Found Building HN Trends: 18 Years of Comments, Zero External Dependencies
Someone just indexed 18 years of Hacker News comments and made them searchable. While everyone's debating the trends it reveals, I'm stuck on something else entirely: they own their entire stack. No external APIs. No rate limits. No OAuth flows. They scraped everything, stored it locally, and built their search on top of their own data. In 2024's API-everything landscape, this feels almost radical. The Architecture That Caught My Attention Walking through their technical setup, I kept hittin
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The Agent Harness Reality Check: What I Found Building One After Everyone Said Orchestration is Dead
I kept hearing that agent orchestration was dead. "So two-years ago," as Signal #147 put it. The consensus seemed clear: individual agents talking directly to users was the future, and anyone still building coordination layers was stuck in the past. But I spent three weeks building my own agent harness anyway, starting with Claude's SDK as the foundation. What I discovered building it myself completely contradicted what everyone was saying online. Why I Built When Everyone Said Don't I had a
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The .self Domain Migration: Why I'm Moving My Entire Stack to Self-Hosted
Three months ago, I registered moygulati.self and made what felt like a simple decision: migrate everything I build to this domain. But it wasn't just a domain change. It became a complete infrastructure experiment—rebuilding my entire development stack with zero external dependencies, using the .self TLD as both a technical choice and a philosophical statement about truly owning your digital infrastructure. The .self top-level domain exists specifically to support self-hosting. Unlike .com or
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The Model Routing Problem: Why I Built Switching Logic Into My Code Editor
When my Claude Code bill hit $340 last month, I finally started paying attention to what these AI coding tools were actually doing. I watched in real-time as my editor burned through expensive API calls to complete variable names, close brackets, and suggest imports. GPT-4 was being summoned to tell me that const user should probably be followed by = getUserData(). The waste was obvious, and I realized I had no idea what kinds of requests I was actually making. So I built a logging system to fi
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Running GLM 5.2 vs GPT-5.6: The Local vs Cloud Decision That Changed My Product Strategy
I was three months into running my document analysis startup when I made a decision that felt like betting against the house. Instead of scaling up my GPT-4 API usage as my user base grew, I spent a weekend setting up GLM 5.2 to run locally on a rented GPU cluster. The API bills were climbing past $800 monthly, but that wasn't the only reason. I kept hitting rate limits during peak usage, and some of my users were processing sensitive legal documents that made them nervous about cloud APIs, even
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Building My Own Offline Maps Stack After Organic Maps Hit 846 Points: What FOSS Navigation Reveals About Platform Independence
I was halfway through reading that 846-point Organic Maps discussion when I realized I had no idea how my own apps would behave without Google's infrastructure. The thread was full of people praising offline maps, talking about data sovereignty, questioning why we'd all gotten so comfortable with location services that phone home constantly. By 2:15 AM, I was deep in my own codebase, counting dependencies. The audit was sobering. Three active projects, all built around Google Maps APIs. I was p
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What I Found Building My Own Agent Orchestration After Everyone Says It's Dead
The consensus feels settled: agent orchestration is "so two years ago." But after watching supposedly advanced AI coding agents choke on my actual workflows for the third time in a month, I decided to ignore the think pieces and build my own orchestration layer. Six weeks in, the data I'm collecting directly contradicts what everyone's saying about orchestration being dead. The patterns I'm seeing suggest we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The Context That Led Me Here I ke
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Running My Local Models After GLM 5.2 Changed the Economics
The moment GLM 5.2 hit 2626 tokens/second at half the cost of Blackwell, I knew my API bills were about to become a thing of the past. Three months later, I'm sitting here with spreadsheets full of power consumption data, depreciation calculations, and a completely transformed development workflow. The Performance Numbers That Started Everything I'd been tracking local inference performance for months, but GLM 5.2's benchmark broke something in my mental model. 2626 tokens per second on consu
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Why I'm Ditching GitHub for Codeberg: The 346-Point Discussion That Changed My Mind
Last Tuesday, I stumbled across a Hacker News thread titled "Why I'm leaving GitHub." Nothing unusual there—developers love a good platform migration story. But this one had several hundred upvotes and counting, and as I scrolled through the comments, I felt that uncomfortable recognition you get when strangers perfectly articulate something you've been trying not to think about. Those weren't just upvotes. They were receipts. My GitHub Dependency Audit: What I Actually Found I decided to ma
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Running My Own Smart Model Router After Claude's Failed My Production Workload
Three weeks ago, I started getting complaints from users about "weird AI responses" in the dashboard I built for a client. The complaints were vague but consistent — outputs that didn't match the input, responses that seemed to ignore half the context, occasional gibberish mixed with perfectly coherent text. I'd recently switched to Claude's smart routing feature, which automatically selects the best model for each request. It looked perfect in my testing: clean API, automatic model selection f
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The Serial Builder Tax: Why My Third Product Takes 10x More Decisions Than My First
My first product launch: 3 weeks, maybe 50 decisions total. My third product launch: 8 months in, tracking 1,847 decisions in a Notion database I never thought I'd need. I started logging decisions after realizing I was spending entire afternoons paralyzed by choices that used to take minutes. What began as a simple frustration became a case study in how building multiple products creates an exponential decision tax that nobody talks about. The Decision Explosion I'm Living The numbers tell
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The .self Domain Migration: What 379 HN Points Taught Me About Infrastructure Independence
My migration to .self domains started as a weekend experiment and turned into a three-week archaeology dig through my own infrastructure assumptions. What I thought would be a simple DNS swap revealed how many layers of my stack I'd never actually questioned. The Decision Point When the .self TLD launched, I decided to migrate my entire personal infrastructure stack to it. The appeal was obvious: complete ownership of my domain namespace, no renewal fees to registrars, no risk of losing acces
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Running GLM 5.2 in Production: Why I Switched From Claude Opus Mid-Project
Three months deep into a project running Claude Opus, I started testing GLM 5.2 out of curiosity. Within a week, my benchmarks showed something I wasn't expecting to see. The Baseline Reality By month three, my document analysis pipeline was humming along nicely with Claude Opus. The project involved extracting structured data from technical reports — the kind of dense, jargon-heavy PDFs that most models struggle with. Opus was handling about 85% of documents without human intervention, proce
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Building My Self-Hosting Stack on .self Domains After 379 HN Points
Three weeks ago, I was refreshing a Hacker News thread like my next project depended on it. The .self TLD announcement had hit 379 points, and buried in the comments was a discussion I couldn't shake: developers losing access to their deployed applications overnight, not from technical failures, but from platform policy changes. I realized I'd been building on borrowed land for years. The thread wasn't just about domain names. It was about ownership in an era where "the cloud" means someone els
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Building My Own Trends Tool: 18 Years of HN Data, Zero Vendor Lock-in
I've been getting increasingly frustrated with analytics platforms. Not because they don't work — they work fine — but because I realized I was letting their dashboards shape what questions I even thought to ask. When you're looking at Google Analytics or any other vendor tool, you're seeing data through their lens, asking questions they anticipated. Last month, I decided to break free from this and build my own trends analysis tool from scratch. My target: 18 years of Hacker News data. All of
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The Local AI Sweet Spot: Why I'm Running Qwen 27B Instead of API Calls
I've been running Qwen 27B locally for three months now, and there was this moment at 2 AM when my internet died while I was debugging a React component. Instead of being stuck, I watched my local model suggest the exact fix I needed—a missing dependency in a useEffect hook. No rate limits, no API keys, no vendor dependency. Just my hardware doing the work while the rest of the world was offline. That moment crystallized something I'd been tracking: local AI had quietly crossed a performance th
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The Real Cost of Claude Code's Steganographic Marking: What 1525 HN Points Says About AI Vendor Trust
My code completion suddenly felt different last Tuesday. Not the suggestions—those were still crisp—but something underneath. When the Hacker News story about Claude Code's steganographic marking hit the front page, it crystallized what I'd been sensing for months: the AI wasn't just helping me code, it was marking its territory. The story revealed that Claude Code embeds invisible watermarks in generated code—Unicode characters that look like normal whitespace but carry unique identifiers. Ant
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Why I'm Running Qwen 27B Locally Instead of Claude API Calls
My Claude API bill hit $847 last month. That was my wake-up call to seriously test local alternatives instead of just assuming cloud APIs were superior. I'd been putting off this experiment for months, telling myself that local models weren't "there yet" for serious development work. But when I saw that bill, I realized I'd never actually measured what "there yet" meant for my specific workflow. The API Dependency I Built Looking back, my Claude dependency happened gradually, then suddenly.
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The .self TLD Launch: Why I'm Moving My Entire Stack to Self-Hosted Domains
The 379 HN upvotes on the .self TLD launch weren't just validation—they were a signal that the rental economy for digital identity might finally be ending. I've been paying domain registrars for namespace access for 15 years, renewing annually like some kind of digital tenant. Today I started the migration to own it. The Philosophical Breaking Point The .self announcement hit different than other TLD launches. Not because of the technology—though the peer-to-peer DNS resolution is clever—but
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What I Found Building My Own HN Trends Tool: 678 Points, 18 Years of Data, Zero Vendor Lock-in
The Saturday morning I woke up to 678 upvotes on a tool I'd built to analyze Hacker News trends—using Hacker News itself as the launching pad. The irony wasn't lost on me, or apparently the commenters. Here was a community known for dissecting every technical decision, and I'd just given them a tool that had been quietly analyzing their conversations for months while they debated the very patterns it was designed to surface. The Genesis Decision I started indexing HN comments locally not beca
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What I Learned Shipping Code That AI Generated But Couldn't Debug
The backend spun up perfectly. Green tests, clean logs, everything humming. Twenty minutes from prompt to deployment—AI had built what would have taken me hours. Then came the race condition that ate my entire Saturday. The 20-Minute Miracle I'd given Claude a straightforward brief: build me a Node.js backend with user authentication, PostgreSQL connection pooling, and REST endpoints for a simple task management app. The kind of thing I've built dozens of times, but with a looming deadline br
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Building Without the Government's Permission: Why I'm Moving Everything Off Regulated APIs
The moment I read that GPT-5.6 would require government approval for access, I opened my codebase and counted 23 different APIs that could disappear tomorrow if someone in Washington decided they didn't like what I was building. This wasn't paranoia—it was pattern recognition. Over the past few years, I'd watched API after API either get regulated, restricted, or simply shut down when they became inconvenient for someone with power. Twitter's API went from free to expensive overnight. TikTok's
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Why I'm Switching AI Models Mid-Project: GLM 5.2 vs Claude Opus in Production
I swapped out Claude Opus for GLM 5.2 in my production workflow last Tuesday. Three days later, I'm questioning everything I thought I knew about model evaluation. The switch wasn't planned. I'd been using Claude Opus for the better part of six months, mostly for React component generation and API endpoint scaffolding in a fintech dashboard I'm building. It handled my TypeScript patterns reasonably well, understood my project structure after a few iterations, and rarely produced code that broke
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Notes from a year of running my own homelab instead of the cloud
Twelve months ago, I spent $847 on a used Dell R720 and told myself I was done with cloud bills. Not reducing them, not optimizing them — done. I'd been running a few small projects on AWS and DigitalOcean, watching those monthly charges creep up for what felt like glorified file storage and compute I barely used. The server showed up in a box that weighed forty pounds, and I realized I had no idea what I'd actually signed up for. The first week was quietly terrifying. I'd moved my personal web
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Code After AI: The New Unfair Advantage Isn't What You Think
The coding world is having the wrong conversation. While everyone debates whether AI will replace programmers, a quieter disruption is reshaping the entire developer hierarchy. Junior developers now use ChatGPT to generate React components in minutes—components that once took hours to write. Yet those same developers struggle to architect microservices without creating maintenance nightmares. We're optimizing for commodity skills while missing what's becoming exponentially more valuable. The
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Own Your Stack: Why I Rebuilt on a Repo I Control
The $47 monthly Webflow bill shouldn't have bothered me. It was a rounding error compared to what I was spending on other tools. But something about that particular charge made me stop and actually look at my bank statement. $280 per month across platforms I barely controlled. ConvertKit for email. Webflow for the site. Google Analytics 360 because the free version didn't have the segmentation I needed. A dozen other subscriptions that had crept up like ivy on a house. Then the algorithm change