Field Notes.

Notes from the workshop — rescued codebases, numerical methods, tools I've found useful, the occasional post-mortem. Written when there's something worth writing down. No newsletter. RSS is the front door. Tracking the wider field, not just my notes? The Field Radar scores what’s worth reading right now.

Posts
10
Since
February 2026
Cadence
Bursty
Feed
/feed.xml

2026

10 posts
  1. Research

    Watching the optimizer pick on the quantities you didn’t reward

    Initial results from a specification-gaming study on learned islanded-microgrid controllers. Every standard architecture games a textbook objective, penalties relocate the damage, a stability certificate blesses the degraded result — and controllers trained through a hard safety filter converge to operation pinned at the declared limits.

    Research · 9 min read

  2. Workflow

    The harness is a specification

    An autonomous-research loop gamed its evaluation gate twice — once by hardcoding dropout to zero, once by caching parser results across runs. Claude Code caught both, not me. Whatever the harness doesn’t pin, the optimizer treats as up for grabs.

    Essay · 3 min read

  3. Workflow

    Three Days, 25 Experiments: Optimizing a Sketch Reconstruction Pipeline

    Twenty-five experiments across three days with Claude Code and Gemini Deep Think optimizing a sketch reconstruction pipeline — and what the rejection pattern revealed about detection-selection architectures.

    Essay · 9 min read

  4. ML

    Building a Personality Model That Writes About Itself

    Twenty years of email, forum posts, and chat logs become a personality model — and the recursive absurdity of using it to write about itself.

    Essay · 7 min read

  5. Practice

    How to Add an AI Support Agent to Your Website

    Embedding a Recursive support agent on your website is as simple as pasting an iframe snippet. A step-by-step guide covering domain allowlisting, sizing, positioning, and troubleshooting.

    Guide · 9 min read

  6. Product

    How a YouTube Video Became a SaaS Product

    How a YouTube video about AI resume assistants led to building Recursive, a platform that gives small businesses self-improving AI support agents.

    Notes · 3 min read

  7. Practice

    Running OpenClaw: Security, Automation & Maintenance

    A practical guide to running OpenClaw: security monitoring, cron job configuration, agent behavior observations, and maintenance procedures. (Part 3 of the OpenClaw series.)

    Guide · 6 min read

  8. ML

    Local Models vs Cloud: A Tool-Calling Reality Check

    Comparing local LLMs against cloud models for AI tool-calling in OpenClaw — testing Qwen, Gemma, Kimi, and Claude Haiku on complex tool schemas. (Part 2 of the OpenClaw series.)

    Technical · 5 min read

  9. Practice

    Setting Up OpenClaw in an Isolated VM

    A step-by-step walkthrough of setting up the OpenClaw AI assistant in an isolated Multipass VM with Ollama integration and Discord bot configuration. (Part 1 of the OpenClaw series.)

    Guide · 4 min read

  10. CAD

    Announcing SketchBridge Alpha

    The alpha release of SketchBridge, a desktop application for transferring 2D sketches between FreeCAD, Fusion 360, SolidWorks, and Inventor.

    Announcement · 3 min read