A Packing List That Became a Model
A Swamp model that turns a few trip details into a categorized packing list, previews before it touches Todoist, and asks before it commits.
Writing
Locking Hermes in the Swamp
I wanted Hermes to stop improvising and start reusing the models and workflows we had already built. The setup was short. Proving it worked took wrong homes, hidden errors, a broken registry, and one extension Hermes finally published and ran through Discord.
The Spreadsheet Stayed Home
Tracking meal expenses on a work trip by chatting with an agent from an elevator, and why the ledger lives in a Swamp model instead of a spreadsheet or a note.
The Swamp Between Recording and Review
Twenty cameras can see a lot, but the useful footage is scattered across views right when I don't have time to click through a timeline. Swamp lets an agent take the first export pass so review can happen later, from a real screen.
The Update Button Needed a Second Opinion
UniFi update notifications are satisfying to clear—until the hardware you depend on turns an ordinary firmware update into a troubleshooting project. Swamp gave mine a second opinion first.
The Alert Loop That Came Home
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.
Swamp Fables: The Lock, the Gator, and the Duct Tape
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.
Faithful Presence in an Age of AI
A three-part series about truth, allegiance, and wisdom while using AI as Christians.
The Agent That Keeps the Receipts
A benchmark can show a model is fast. A structured agent record can show whether it actually earns a place in the workflow.
The Fear of the Lord in an Age of AI
AI can assist with many kinds of work, but it cannot take the place of Christian wisdom, conscience, responsibility, prayer, or worship.
The Market Is Not the Temple
Christians should take AI’s moral pressures seriously without confusing ordinary use of a tool with worshipful allegiance.
Where Benchmarks Are Prophecies
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.
The Home Assistant Entities I Actually Want on My Watch
I did not want a dashboard on my wrist. I wanted a short, trustworthy status signal—and a little progress marker.
Capture Debt
I spent a few minutes prompting Hermes during a homeschool conference, and the automation made me more engaged, not less.
From Manual Checklist to Merge Gate: E2E Testing with Swamp
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.
Local Agents Are Not Toys
Local LLMs on the M5 Max have become useful for bounded agent work, but they are not Amp or Claude killers yet.
Throwing Hermes into the Swamp
Hermes and Swamp finally worked once I stopped chasing install ownership and fixed the session snapshot that every tool subprocess sources.
Agents Make Homelab Alerts Boring
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.
An Offline Meeting Transcriber Built on Swamp
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.
Visibility Into the Black Box
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.
Review: Wild and Glorious
A pastoral and practical take on AI from a Christian perspective — wise, winsome, and well-timed.
Code Proven to Work
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.
The Theory-Building Problem
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.
The Southwest Companion Pass is Not Worth It
The Southwest Companion Pass is often cited as the best deal in travel. But is it worth the effort for most people?
Nearly Free Google Play Store Credits
How I've earned over $100 in Google Play Store credits just by answering short surveys on my phone.
Earning $60 in One Minute
A quick tip on how to maximize your Southwest Rapid Rewards points with minimal effort.
Saving Money on Cell Phone Plans
Stop overpaying for your cell phone plan. There are plenty of MVNOs that offer the same service for a fraction of the cost.
Meagerfindings?
What is Meagerfindings and why did I start this blog?
Earning $900 in Less Than 4 Hours
Bank account bonuses are one of the easiest ways to make extra money if you have some spare cash sitting around.
Trip Report: Backpacking the Four Pass Loop
A 28-mile loop through the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, crossing four 12,000+ foot passes.