Field notes, written as I ship. Newest first.
73 posts
I hit Claude Code's weekly limit mid-refactor, then ran the same repo through seven alternatives for two weeks. The three I kept, and the honest catch nobody markets.
My CI step running claude -p hung for the full timeout, waiting on a permission prompt no human would answer. The three flags that fix headless Claude Code, the jobs I kept, and the two I ripped back out.
A month of running Cursor and Claude Code on the same repo. The honest 2026 verdict: it is not either-or, and the real question is not IDE vs CLI.
A field log of Claude Code's built-in /sandbox: what its OS-level cage actually locks down, the setup that bit me, what auto-allow still stops for, the tools that broke, and the one thing it does not protect.
Claude Code checkpoints and /rewind are fast in-session recovery, not version control. A field log on what a checkpoint actually captures, what it silently ignores (bash writes, your own hand-edits), and the two-line git habit that keeps it safe.
A first-person weekend log of cloning and running ai-app-builder-open, an open source AI app builder, on localhost. What worked, the one API key you need, and the honest catch versus local-first Dyad.
The three arrays, the precedence rule nobody explains, the two gotchas that cost me an afternoon, and the exact settings.json allow, ask, and deny block I run now.
Two weeks of pushing real work onto Claude Code subagents. The two I kept, the frontmatter line that actually decides delegation, and the gotcha that cost me an afternoon.
An honest 2026 field log on Claude Code skills: I installed 30 community skills, deleted almost all of them, and kept the three I wrote for my own repo. What a skill is actually good for, and the rule I use to pick skill vs CLAUDE.md vs MCP.
I ran spec-driven development for a month on a live B2B product. An honest 2026 field log: where the spec earned its overhead, where it was pure ceremony, and the six-heading spec that survived.
I lived on Claude Code Router for two weeks in 2026. Here is the per-task routing config I actually run, and where routing to cheap models quietly wrecks a session.
Claude Code can now drive a real browser: read the console, click through your app, fill forms, pull data. Two weeks of using it on live work, what it replaced, where it still hands the keyboard back, and the context-cost footgun nobody warns you about.
