A naturalist’s observation of the modern computational order — coding agents, developer programmes, identity systems, canals, weather, cloth. Drawn from life and filed by plate.
Recent plates
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Plate XLV.
The Note App Was a Compatibility Project.
De granite. A field note on Granite, plain Markdown, local files, and the inconvenient amount of product hidden inside the phrase Obsidian-compatible. May 2026.
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Plate XLIV.
A Valkey server for the workbench.
De bun. A field note on valkey-bun, local infrastructure, and the usefulness of an in-memory service that knows exactly when to forget. May 2026.
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Plate XLIII.
Atlas and the Self-Upgrading Agent.
De ai. A field note on letting an agent add new capabilities to itself by checking out its own repo, changing code, testing, deploying, monitoring, and rolling back when reality objects. May 2026.
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Plate XLII.
Building a semantic ripgrep.
De ai. A practical note on code-search, BM25 ranking, and why coding agents need both fast exact search and cheap conceptual orientation. May 2026.
Selected specimens
A drawer of working software, observed and classified.
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Specimen I.
the-wire.
Anatis distribuita, a Twitter clone running on Cloudflare Workers, with Durable Objects for state.
Habitat — github.com/chrischabot.
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Specimen II.
coding-agent.
Agens recursivus, a CLI coding agent built to study how AI assistants work — parallel tools, sub-agents, permissions.
Habitat — github.com/chrischabot.