How this blog works

Since ideas are more interesting than the code, we need a place to store the ideas. The code is already stored by GitHub. This blog stores the ideas behind the code.

The blog itself is a GitHub repository served by GitHub Pages. It's built on React, and the posts are markdown files with YAML frontmatter for metadata¹. None of that is the interesting part — terminal UIs in the browser were possible ten years ago. What's new is that writing a post involves invoking a Claude skill². The skill pulls down whichever of my public repositories are relevant to the post³, walks their commit history⁴, reads the files the post actually touches, and turns bare project names into links and concrete claims about code into footnotes that open the source in place⁵. I don't want Claude inventing facts about my code. Citations force it to open the file first.

I write the posts. Claude structures them into markdown, adds the links, files them where they belong, and deploys to GitHub Pages⁶. It also rewrites every post in a non-technical version, and either version can stand alone, because sometimes the tradeoff I care about is different for a dev than for my parents.

The past year I've been experimenting with spec-driven development and CLIs that lift logic out of prompts and into the tool itself. If the rules live in a prompt they drift. If they live in the binary they don't. oss-spec is what this blog itself conforms to, and I'll be writing about that approach along with the other tools I've built around it. They're all open source on my GitHub.

I don't usually blog, but when I do, it's mostly a tech demo.