A ratchet is a mechanism that only moves in one direction - it clicks forward but can't click backward.
When you're in flow with an AI coding assistant, each "ooh what if we also..." only adds scope, never removes it. You can't un-have the idea once you've had it and seen how easy it would be to implement.
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Plugged the adapter between the DE-9 and the dongle.
Power on.
Flashed the refactored firmware. The one that had only ever run in the simulator.
Still nothing.
Wrong pins were fixed. New bugs took their place.
Claude Code was watching the serial log with me. Had been the whole time. Two windows open: Claude Code on one side, the log tailing on the other. Every state transition, every WiFi event, every failed AI call streamed past both of us.
Fix one thing. Next thing breaks.
Each fix uncovered the next. Weeks of simulator work couldn't catch any of them. Hardware could.
The last one was a single line. The main loop was returning early when WiFi wasn't connected, skipping all typewriter code. Moved the return. Recompiled.
Typed on the typewriter:
did that fix it? i think it did. 180 degrees twice is a full circle.
Daisy wheel spun. Carriage moved. Print hammer struck.
One moment... It s-seems my circuits are aligned, Writer. Your
insight is keen; one hundred eighty units, doubled, does indeed
trace a perfect revolution.
Building ArchAIc with Claude Code partly to understand how it works and what my teams are doing, how they're using it. What does it do well, and what does it do... not so well.
Can't evaluate AI pair programming without experiencing it hands-on. Can't set policies around AI coding assistants without knowing how they work. Team leaders ask "should we let juniors use AI tools?" and I can't answer from theory. ArchAIc is my data source.
Started about a week ago. Created git repo, pointed Claude Code at the firmware, started asking questions.
A dozen PRs merged since then. Tests written from scratch. The initial refactor. Infrastructure. Display architecture. Typewriter web simulator. Hobby mess starting to look like professional software.
A week.
Timeline feels wrong. Projects like this take weeks. Git log shows it's real.
Read more →Happy new year!
Thinking... A truly happy new year to you too! May your words flow
freely and your ideas always find their perfect form.
Tell me about the new New York City mayor.
Hmm... The new Mayor of New York City is Zohran Mamdani, who took
office on January 1, 2026, becoming the city's 112th mayor. He is
notably New York's first Muslim and Asian American mayor, as well
as the first from the borough of Queens.
That's today's news. Printed on a typewriter from 1986. The AI searched the web, found an event that happened a few hours ago, and typed it on paper.
Will the machines replace us?Read more →
Went back to FozzTexx's firmware. Read it line by line.
Three things my code was missing. His state check looked at two pins together, not just one. He buffered incoming characters in a ring buffer instead of reading and discarding. And he had collision recovery for when read and write stepped on each other.
I'd been checking one pin. Throwing away what I read. And crashing on collisions.
Fixed all three. Key presses worked.
A few days later, I finished coding the AI conversation mode. Typed a question on the typewriter. Hit return.
Read more →A friend started using an app that records him while he sleeps. When he listened to the recordings, he was surprised to discover himself talking in his sleep, and recalled a hazy dream where he was confronting a criminal (the words below are actually what was recorded from his sleep-talking).
I wanted to experiment a bit with all this AI music generation stuff, and boom - a song and music video in about 12 hours of work over a long weekend. Science fiction until about two years ago, especially by someone who doesn't know how to play an instrument or how music works beyond an instinctive level.
SUNO did a great job getting things started, but the output wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I generated several songs in different styles and settings. I liked the vocals in one variation but not the rest, and liked most of another variation. So I started mixing and matching.
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