Adam Fortuna

My interests, for the real-people-algorithm. 👋 🏔️ Hiking 📚 Books 🟰 Equality 🧙‍♂️ Fantasy 👨‍💻 Web dev ✍️ Blogging 🎲 Board games 🏋️ Olympic lifting 🧘 Quantified self 👾 Science fiction 🧑‍🎨 Interior design 🌱 Personal growth 🦵 ACL tear recovery 🇯🇵 Learning Japanese 📊 Data visualizations 💸 Index fund investing

This is Hard Tech Week in Salt Lake City, with a series of events focused on hardware. Yesterday kicked off the hackathon, which inspiration hit to work on. 💡 If you’re in Utah, I’d love to get your thoughts! Next step is connecting it to hard tech (sprinkler systems). overwater.ing

Realized Claude Code can create Shortcuts (for Mac/iOS) customized to your exact workflow. Create two simple ones to create voice/text quotes in my Obsidian Vault, saving the quote, author, source and tags. Bonus feature: saving last quote metadata to a tmp file so the next quote can reuse it.

The poll so far between Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. I think it looks less absurd than last time, but still pretty clear that the base is divided. bsky.app/profile/mits...

Loving Salt Lake’s “I Voted” stickers, which have an embroidery style this year.

Beside the models themselves (Opus, Fable, Astra, Sol, etc), what are the most useful parts of your AI stack?

Been working on a new Monthly Wrapup generator on Hardcover, which has been a lot of fun! Adding different sizes, themes, and options for style and which books show up. Super excited to share this one soon.

I’ve been playing around writing a book version of the Beli app (rank restaurants to find your favorites). Creating an algorithm for the order it compares that optimizes for fewest decisions, lowest mental energy and overall fun is proving more difficult than I thought. 😅

Watching My Royal Nemesis and fixing some N+1 queries in a PR stack from Conductor on my phone. All of those things didn’t exist a year ago. Well, except the N+1 queries.

Trying out Conductor Cloud after being a desktop user for a while, and this is fills the gap we’d been looking for: a single app for building locally and remotely, that hands off work to mobile. A coder and reviewer agent are working together in a PR, w/ability to see cut into any conversation.

2/ Americans ask for healthcare, affordable housing, gas and groceries. Trump and Hegseth give them a public execution. American Evangelicals claim to want “the Kingdom of God” but more and more they are re-creating Rome’s Empire. The very empire that put Jesus to death by public execution.

Tried out the hand prototype to product line today, and it went pretty well on the first pass with Opus 5.5. Data wise everything is right, but needs some more polish to _feel_ right.

Great write up on Pulp Magazine on the rise of tracking media use and why we’ve seen a rise in that activity (ie Hardcover). How Media Cataloging Sites Turned Taste Into a Sport pulpmagazine.com/article/2792

Hardcover has been hit hard by bots over the last 2 months, including distributed hits from residential IPs around the world. It's been a game of whack-a-mole all week. New CloudFlare rules stop them, then a few hours later they get by them. Upgraded to CF Business yesterday, so we'll see 🤞

Fascinating stat for Hardcover. We recently hit 100k confirmed email users (160k unconfirmed). With 31k active in the last month. Curious to see how that changes w/the new email confirm first (vs 3 days). New CF bot restrictions have raised the unconfirmed email users from 55%→98% (!).

Hadn't checked on my old site minafi.com in a while. Got an email from Google Analytics (it was started in 2017 - it was a different time), and looks like the bots have found it. Unless sure 5,800 people from Singapore are really into minimalism, mindfulness and financial independence.

if there are people at 1password making the racists afraid to be openly racist at work, a genuine thank you. no one is paid enough to do that work but it’s not to be taken for granted, also sorry you work with scumbags and your ceo is a colossal baby with no swag

Excited to hit 1,000 paid supporters on Hardcover today! 🥳 Building anything in the book space requires a _lot_ of patience. It's taken just over 5 years to get to this point – and we're still far from able to pay full salaries for us working on it (~1.5-2 full-time). Very exciting milestone 📈

Adam Fortuna (Hardcover founder) is making D3.js click: core mental models plus AI prompt templates to go from "I get it" to a working dashboard. #UtahJS, Sept 18 @ 11:05 AM. ti.to/utahjs/2026

Lately I've been jumping around between a bunch of Conductor PRs. I'm curious how others have handled this. What's helped me is creating Chrome Tab Groups that match the name of name of the Conductor workspace, with colors depending if I'm waiting on an agent to build, CI to run, or agent review.

New rambling: The Internet was never real, on generative AI and missing the trees for the forest. standard-reader.app/a/did:plc:5w...

The Hardcover team has been using a super-basic GitHub + Claude integration with the ability to work on issues, create PRs and conduct code reviews. (coding & PR review are Claude skills in the repo). Working on V2 of this system now with a timeline, multiple agents, and cost estimates.

We're getting ready to launch Vibes later month on Hardcover! 🥳 They're available now in preview to supporters. I sat down yesterday with Adam to chat about how Vibes work behind the scenes and what's next for them. Warning: we say "vector" a lot. hardcover.app/live/65

A Mac Studio with 1.5 TB of memory? At current rates that would probably cost more than a car, but it could enable running some massive local models. 🤔 www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

The idea of a shared book database in the atmosphere is really exciting and could outlive any single project working in the book space. Worth getting involved in if you're creating anything in the book space.

After meeting with a bunch of arborist, I finally felt safe (for the trees) to cut some roots in our basement. Each one I talked said "I've never seen something like this before". That's ~9 times people we work with have said that. The joys of owning an old house. 😅 Bucky for scale.

New blog post & personal updates on what I've been up to outside of work lately. A bit of a personal journal entry, but also a concept that's been helpful for me recently. The Personal Reset adamfortuna.com/reset

Back to the Claude mines

Great article about how fragile masculinity and the manosphere have impacted politics. Going from almost having the first woman president to this is, well, sad. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It’s Pioneer Day today, Utah’s campy holiday that’s a combination of Independence Day and Columbus Day. For non-LDS folks like myself, it’s also called Pie and Beer Day. Picked up 4 mini pies to celebrate. 🥧