https://matgreten.dev/ Writing by Mat Greten en-us Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-alert-loop-that-came-home https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-alert-loop-that-came-home Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A two-sentence Discord prompt at a rest stop became a route-risk watch, then a quiet home safety system — and a lesson in keeping an agent from over-publishing what it builds. https://matgreten.dev/posts/swamp-fables https://matgreten.dev/posts/swamp-fables Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Two weeks of orchestrated agent swarms, a datastore mess of my own making, and an upstream bug loop that actually worked — the projects I'd stopped starting are moving again. https://matgreten.dev/posts/faithful-presence-in-an-age-of-ai https://matgreten.dev/posts/faithful-presence-in-an-age-of-ai Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A three-part series about truth, allegiance, and wisdom while using AI as Christians. https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-agent-that-keeps-the-receipts https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-agent-that-keeps-the-receipts Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A benchmark can show a model is fast. A structured agent record can show whether it actually earns a place in the workflow. https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-fear-of-the-lord-in-an-age-of-ai https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-fear-of-the-lord-in-an-age-of-ai Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 AI can assist with many kinds of work, but it cannot take the place of Christian wisdom, conscience, responsibility, prayer, or worship. https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-market-is-not-the-temple https://matgreten.dev/posts/the-market-is-not-the-temple Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Christians should take AI’s moral pressures seriously without confusing ordinary use of a tool with worshipful allegiance. https://matgreten.dev/posts/where-benchmarks-are-prophecies https://matgreten.dev/posts/where-benchmarks-are-prophecies Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Benchmarks can show us something real, but they cannot carry the weight of prophecy; the truer test is what a model does in the work in front of us. https://matgreten.dev/posts/home-assistant-watch-entities https://matgreten.dev/posts/home-assistant-watch-entities Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I did not want a dashboard on my wrist. I wanted a short, trustworthy status signal—and a little progress marker. https://matgreten.dev/posts/capture-debt https://matgreten.dev/posts/capture-debt Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I spent a few minutes prompting Hermes during a homeschool conference, and the automation made me more engaged, not less. https://matgreten.dev/posts/swamp-e2e-testing https://matgreten.dev/posts/swamp-e2e-testing Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 How I replaced a manual checklist and AI browser agent with a Swamp extension model that gates PRs with structured, queryable test results — no cloud CI spend required. https://matgreten.dev/posts/local-agents-are-not-toys https://matgreten.dev/posts/local-agents-are-not-toys Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Local LLMs on the M5 Max have become useful for bounded agent work, but they are not Amp or Claude killers yet. https://matgreten.dev/posts/throwing-hermes-into-the-swamp https://matgreten.dev/posts/throwing-hermes-into-the-swamp Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hermes and Swamp finally worked once I stopped chasing install ownership and fixed the session snapshot that every tool subprocess sources. https://matgreten.dev/posts/agents-make-homelab-alerts-boring https://matgreten.dev/posts/agents-make-homelab-alerts-boring Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A Frigate storage alert became a small example of why agents and Swamp are working so well in my homelab: bounded context, reviewable changes, and asynchronous fixes that preserve headspace. https://matgreten.dev/posts/offline-meeting-transcriber https://matgreten.dev/posts/offline-meeting-transcriber Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I built an offline meeting transcriber using local Whisper, pyannote, and Ollama, then migrated it to swamp — the same typed models now power my terminal, my agent, and a future watch-folder, without copy-pasting a script. https://matgreten.dev/posts/visibility-into-the-black-box https://matgreten.dev/posts/visibility-into-the-black-box Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I built an AI pipeline that ships production code to a ten-year-old Rails monolith about 90% of the time. But when it fails, or when I change something and want to know if it helped, I'm guessing. Three days of migrating to swamp gave me structured data for every decision the pipeline makes. https://matgreten.dev/posts/wild-and-glorious https://matgreten.dev/posts/wild-and-glorious Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A pastoral and practical take on AI from a Christian perspective — wise, winsome, and well-timed. https://matgreten.dev/posts/code-proven-to-work https://matgreten.dev/posts/code-proven-to-work Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Two things resonated from Simon Willison's post on agent-written code: owning the output regardless of who wrote it, and working code — not artisanal craft — as the real deliverable. https://matgreten.dev/posts/theory-building https://matgreten.dev/posts/theory-building Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Claude Code handled complex tasks well in plan mode, but using it through a cooldown left me with quick solutions and a shaky mental model — until a post on Naur crystallized why. https://matgreten.dev/posts/southwest-companion-pass https://matgreten.dev/posts/southwest-companion-pass Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 The Southwest Companion Pass is often cited as the best deal in travel. But is it worth the effort for most people? https://matgreten.dev/posts/google-opinion-rewards https://matgreten.dev/posts/google-opinion-rewards Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 How I've earned over $100 in Google Play Store credits just by answering short surveys on my phone. https://matgreten.dev/posts/6000-rapid-rewards https://matgreten.dev/posts/6000-rapid-rewards Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 A quick tip on how to maximize your Southwest Rapid Rewards points with minimal effort. https://matgreten.dev/posts/saving-money-cell-phone https://matgreten.dev/posts/saving-money-cell-phone Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Stop overpaying for your cell phone plan. There are plenty of MVNOs that offer the same service for a fraction of the cost. https://matgreten.dev/posts/meagerfindings https://matgreten.dev/posts/meagerfindings Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 What is Meagerfindings and why did I start this blog? https://matgreten.dev/posts/earning-900 https://matgreten.dev/posts/earning-900 Fri, 13 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 Bank account bonuses are one of the easiest ways to make extra money if you have some spare cash sitting around. https://matgreten.dev/posts/four-pass-loop https://matgreten.dev/posts/four-pass-loop Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 A 28-mile loop through the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, crossing four 12,000+ foot passes.