Poiesic Systems

Like many software engineers of my vintage (Gen X) my core influences include William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and The Matrix movie series. That’s right, cyberpunk baby. Of course, despite the hopes and dreams of a generation we didn’t get Gibsonian cyberspace. We got the web in all it’s hacky glory. Don’t get me wrong, though. The web is very cool.

It’s just not as cool as jacking in to your custom Ono-Sendai deck and hacking some Tessier-Ashpool ICE while your vat-grown ninja from the black clinics in Chiba has your back.

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In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Henry Molaison underwent surgery to treat severe epilepsy. Surgeons removed most of his hippocampus, a small curved structure deep in the temporal lobe, from both hemispheres. The seizures improved. Henry stopped making long-term memories.

Henry could carry on a perfectly coherent conversation. His intelligence was intact. His working memory functioned normally. He could hold information in mind, reason about it, and respond appropriately. He had full access to memories formed before the surgery. His personality was unchanged.

He just couldn’t form new long-term memories. Every conversation started fresh. His doctors reintroduced themselves at every visit for the next fifty-five years. He could read the same magazine and find it novel each time. He would grieve his uncle’s death anew every time someone told him.

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There’s a new discipline coming to software engineering. I’m calling it forensic refactoring: the practice of reverse-engineering intent from code that never had any.

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The last two years have been hard. The kind of hard that makes you want to demand to speak with life’s manager so you can punch them in the throat. I’m not going to catalog the specifics because this isn’t that kind of post and you’re not my therapist. But 2024 and 2025 tested me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. There were times where I wasn’t sure that I’d be equal to the challenge.

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In the few hours a day I’m not spending on building Collabchek I’ve been hacking on a personal AI chat client. I’ve used several and the one that’s come closest to what I want has been sigogden’s very cool aichat project which I encourage you to check out. I’ve liberally borrowed several good ideas from their code.

As I’ve explored I’ve come to realize my requirements are somewhat unique.

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Here’s a quick hack I came up with while experimenting with git worktrees and multiple coding agents and dealing with pod naming collisions when bringing up multiple copies of my local dev stack.

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tl;dr Install these tools

Here’s the priority order for maximum impact:

1. ripgrep, fd, gh - These transform search and git workflows
2. golangci-lint, goimports, gotests - Go development gets SO much smoother
3. gofumpt, staticcheck - Polish that code to a shine
4. jq, bat, fzf - Quality of life improvements you didn’t know you needed

Claude will use these if installed. Since most/all are much faster than the built-in tools they replace it’s a clear win.

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From: chad.sigma@thrallco.com
To: all-employees@thrallco.com
Cc: executive-leadership@thrallco.com; hr-compliance@thrallco.com
Date: Friday, November 7, 2025 4:47 PM
Subject: [MANDATORY] Thought Leadership and Innovation Acceleration Initiative - ACTION REQUIRED BY MONDAY

In our relentless pursuit of operational excellence, we are excited to announce a groundbreaking new policy to accelerate our evolution into an AI-native organization. Effective 8am Monday, all internal dialogues will henceforth be externalized and expressed at full volume as we take our first brave steps enacting our Open Mind, Open Door policy.

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PRESS RELEASE

Neuralink Announces Full Self-Driving™ for Humans, Partners with Apple TV+’s “Severance”

Revolutionary Consciousness Segmentation Brings Fiction to Reality

FREMONT, CA – Neuralink Corporation today announced the launch of Full Self-Driving™ (FSD) for humans, alongside an exclusive partnership with Apple TV+’s “Severance” to deliver work-life consciousness separation.

“Why waste consciousness on your commute when your body can navigate itself?” said Elon Musk, Neuralink CEO. “This is the future humanity deserves.”

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Building AI prototypes as an indie developer taught me three non-obvious lessons that challenge what I thought I knew about working with LLMs.

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Ten people sit in a conference room for an hour. Six team leads take turns reading slides, which rehash status already in JIRA. No decisions get made. Everyone leaves the meeting to do actual work. This happens every month. If asked, none of the attendees could name a single benefit of the meeting. It costs your company $24,000 a year.

Does this sound familiar to you?

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