Four weeks after the work-harness post: cairn learned to keep its own documentation honest, run entire phases unattended inside a token budget, and — twice now — catch its own bugs in the act and ship the fixes. Here’s what a self-running work harness actually looks like, receipts included.
Six weeks of shipping turned cairn from a wrapper around other people’s tools into a full work harness — a four-vendor AI review council, a portfolio board, a platform-native rebuild, and the honest answer to the question that review surfaced: who is cairn actually competing with?
Four real products — a multi-cloud tag and storage tool, a resume tailor, an OKR tracker, and the planning system underneath all of it — built and shipped in about three weeks. What made it fast, what I got wrong, and what AI still can’t do for you.
Two hundred fifty years ago we didn’t just declare independence, we shipped a system designed to protect the raw materials of invention. From the Patent Act of 1790 to fusion ignition in a Livermore lab, here’s why American technology keeps compounding, and the founders’ quiet genius that made it possible.
Containers solve a real, specific problem — and somewhere along the way we started treating them as the answer to every question. Here’s the problem they actually fix, where they earn their keep, and when reaching for them is just cargo cult with a YAML accent.
How working with Claude reshaped my workflow, the two plugins I can’t work without, and the plugin I built — now called Cairn — to make them, every issue tracker I touch, and my context-mode memory agree on one source of truth.
Why this blog exists and what I’ll write about here.