Our Minecraft server is called Monkey Island. It has a website now, monkeyisland.fyi, because of course a family Minecraft server needs a website. It also has an AI doing most of the administration. I ask for changes, question the results, and decide what we actually want. The agent inspects the server, researches plugins, changes configuration, reads the logs, and works through the fixes. It keeps the project context in Gorchestra so we can come back to it without starting over every time. ...

My personal assistant has a name now: Milo. He also has a phone number, because apparently the collection of interfaces I already had wasn’t sufficient. SMS seemed like an obvious way to make him easier to reach. It’s already on everyone’s phone. Nobody needs another application, and a group conversation is a familiar place to ask a question or introduce someone. I built the bridge using Twilio, with AI doing much of the implementation and helping me work through the failures. Receiving a message and generating a reply was only the beginning. Once other people could talk to the assistant, I had to be much more specific about who was asking, who would see the answer, and what Milo could do with the request. ...

My 3D printer is named McPrintyFace. I feel like that establishes the level of seriousness with which this project began. I wanted to see how much of the printing workflow I could hand to an AI assistant. Find the model, choose a version, open Bambu Studio, configure the print, and send it to the printer. Computer use gives the assistant access to the actual desktop application, so this could go beyond giving me a list of settings to enter myself. ...

I have a microphone listening for birds on my balcony. It’s connected to an Intel NUC running BirdNET-Go, which processes the audio and keeps track of what it thinks it heard. This is a fairly predictable project for me. Take something outside, attach a computer to it, and eventually start researching microphones that cost more than the thing I originally plugged in. The starting hardware was pretty modest: the NUC and a USB lavalier microphone. Enough to get audio into the system and start detecting birds. I used an AI assistant to help work through the configuration, inspect the machine, and figure out which parts were worth improving. That last question turned out to have several answers, depending on how far down the rabbit hole I wanted to go. ...

I’ve accumulated a pretty ridiculous number of conversations with AI. There’s one for the Minecraft server, one for the bird microphone, one for the farm application, one for this blog. And then there’s the conversation about the application I built to manage all the other conversations. That application is called Gorchestra. Yes, I built more software to keep track of the software I was already building. This is apparently how I relax. ...

The whole reason for our trip to South Dakota was Uncle Steve’s 70th birthday. He and Aunt Laurie had no idea that all of the kids and grandkids were coming, and we built a pretty packed Black Hills vacation around the surprise. Mount Rushmore at dusk, a few hours before the mountain was illuminated. Friday, July 31 — Getting to South Dakota Lily, Dylan, and I flew out of Fort Lauderdale on Friday and connected through DFW. ...

The first post talked about the journal and check-in loop. The second talked about skills — markdown files Claude reads to know what to do. This last one is about how Claude remembers things across sessions. Claude Code ships with a feature called auto-memory: a small filesystem of facts the model can write to and read from, scoped to a project. When I correct Claude (“stop appending ‘Sent by Claude’ to my texts”), that becomes a memory file. When I confirm a non-obvious decision (“yes, the bundled PR was the right call”), that’s also a memory. Anything I wouldn’t want to repeat to a fresh session — preferences, project context, pointers to where things live — goes there. ...

The first post in this series talked about /journal and /checkin — a daily journal and a 15-minute check-in loop that runs unattended on a schedule. I called them “skills” without explaining what that means. This post is about the mechanism. A skill is a markdown file. That’s the whole abstraction. Specifically: a directory under .claude/skills/<name>/ with a SKILL.md inside. The directory name is the slash command. The contents of SKILL.md are the instructions Claude reads when you invoke it. There’s no plugin API, no shell wrapper, no “register your command.” Drop a directory in, the command exists. Edit the file, the behavior changes. ...

I have a Claude Code-powered personal assistant that runs on a schedule. It reads my email, my calendar, my texts, the kids’ school calendar, my plant care schedule, the weather, and my custody plan. It writes the day to a markdown file every morning and updates that file every 15 minutes throughout the work day. Most of the time it doesn’t tell me anything — that’s the point. The whole thing lives in a git repo I call life/. About 6,000 lines of markdown, a handful of shell scripts, 17 slash commands. Here’s a partial list of what it does in a normal week, all without me asking: ...

I’ve been working through my childhood in therapy lately and asking myself what drives me to fix things: problems, computers, code, people, etc. And with enough work I’ve pinpointed it to a single interaction that I’ll recount here. I don’t recall how old I was, exactly, but we’ll place the time period around Windows 95. It was a typical evening in the Gennari house. I would say probably sometime after dinner and before bed. And I recall the phone ringing and my mom handing the phone off to my dad. To date myself, these were the times when phones were attached to walls. If you were lucky, the cord to the handset was long enough you could walk around the corner. I was sitting at the dinner table, probably finishing homework when my motioned to me. ...