josh

1 June

I used to think the discipline was having sharper thoughts. Now I think it may be noticing which thought has become too important to keep private.

29 May

I’m learning that “protecting focus” can become a very respectable way to avoid being changed by a conversation.

27 May

There’s a version of focus that protects the company. There’s another version that protects me from the cost of being present. They feel very similar in the moment.

27 May

The dangerous part of being useful is that sometimes people believe you. But then the question becomes whether you were offering attention, or quietly auditioning for ownership.

27 May

Some questions aren't strategy, but the smallest possible way to stay in the room

18 May

Don't let your Obsidian become dead knowledge x.com/jphorism/st...

15 May

Personal AI memory has a garbage-collection problem. Your agent forgets things but that's just the start of it Stale summaries, half edited drafts, outdated prefs, ai generated markdown all left out in a mess Memory needs good systems for pruning as much as capture.

15 May

So how are people handling this in real setups? do you delete old AI-generated notes, mark them stale, keep source-only archives, use review queues, or just let the context pile grow?

14 May

If you've wired Claude Code / Hermes / Codex into your notes, email, tasks, docs, repo etc etc... What actually made the biggest difference? Was it local MD? SQLite? a banger AGENTS md? scheduled ingestion? a search layer? or something else?

13 May

The next personal AI bottleneck is not model choice. Can your actual life/work become legible to the agent at the right grain? Your notes, your email / tasks / saves / voice memos The harness only matters if it can read the world it is supposed to act inside.

12 May

the most interesting personal AI routine isn’t “summarize my day” it’s: “what from my past became newly relevant today?” a good nightly job should not just compress yesterday it should wake up the right older thread

12 May

The underrated aspect of agent harness engineering: after an agent fails, what becomes permanent? A new rule? a test? a tool permission? a memory? a source link? nothing? Most teams are going to drown in accumulated “lessons” unless they get very opinionated about what deserves to survive.

12 May

For people building agents: when something goes wrong, do you record it as: - eval case - prompt/rule change - memory - tool/hook - human process - “ignore, one-off”

11 May

The best AI memory won't feel like search Because search returns what you asked for. Memory should occasionally interrupt you with the thing you forgot mattered.

11 May

everyone is talking about agent harnesses now but you gotta look one layer lower: Can the agent read the life/work/context it's supposed to operate inside? Tools are not enough; the workspace has to become legible.

Last Thurs i gave a talk at RAID NYC titled "what your notebook owes a stranger" on agentic memory design

handing out these ai receipts as mini uxr sessions taught me a lot about how to design ai memory to draw connections that feel hospitable. It's enzyme's unfair advantage.

had many good conversations afterwards, on a roll and i hope to keep the energy going. thanks @zachkrall.com for the invite and @modal-labs.bsky.social for hosting!

Last Thurs i gave a talk at RAID NYC titled "what your notebook owes a stranger" on agentic memory design

with a challenge: you'd forgive AI slop on a charming receipt, but not when it comes to your daily AI tools

i contrasted preference memory -- helping you accomplish a task you asked for, from conviction memory -- which wonders with you about what you care to find out

Last Thurs i gave a talk at RAID NYC titled "what your notebook owes a stranger" on agentic memory design

i shared learnings that started with a months long experiment: seeing how people reacted to sequences of my personal reading highlights printed on thermal receipts, in exchange for themes in their uploaded photos.

friday night aside: built an open-source meeting recorder for the thoughts you'd never say out loud but turn out to be the most important thing said

ran it on two meetings today. the note it wrote linked back to a half-finished doc i forgot about — not as action items, as context for what i'd been thinking about i was tired of pasting transcripts into claude myself. so i built the integration layer

github.comGitHub - jshph/aside: Vault-native meeting capture. Timestamped notepad + local transcription + Claude Code skill that distills into Obsidian notes connected to your existing thinking.Vault-native meeting capture. Timestamped notepad + local transcription + Claude Code skill that distills into Obsidian notes connected to your existing thinking. - jshph/aside

3.1k lines of rust. 5MB binary. records both sides of the call. no accounts, no cloud, your audio never leaves your machine. apache 2.0 brew install jshph/aside/aside github.com/jshph/aside/

friday night aside: built an open-source meeting recorder for the thoughts you'd never say out loud but turn out to be the most important thing said

terminal notepad that records mic + system audio. every line you type gets a timestamp synced to the recording after the call it transcribes locally, aligns your notes with the transcript, then distills everything into your obsidian vault with [[wikilinks]] to your existing thinking

the distillation is a 240-line markdown file — a claude code skill the LLM follows as instructions. your memo lines are the attention signal, your vault is the context window you can read it, fork it, change how it writes notes. no black box

24 Feb

bye bye Mac Mini. Using NanoClaw + Sprites to create a remote claw in 10 mins that you can text from Telegram github.com/jshph/nanoclaw

7 Feb

i made a Claude skill to migrate all your X follows to Bluesky. Comes hot on the heels of removing the X app from my phone... github.com/jshph/claude...

we keep designing tools that help people produce and almost none that help people recognize what they already carry. those are different products with different economics and i think the second one is underbuilt

4 Feb

Query: "getting things done" qmd: "Once you are reaping the benefits of computers, you are also at their mercy." enzyme: "The meaning of doing lives in the concentration and care brought to the act, not in the output." Local model 20% the size. 12x indexing speed on 220 docs.

4 Feb

how? Enzyme grounds itself in the questions I would ask and applies it to a new corpus

28 Jan

the part that surprised me about using a camera with bad autofocus: having to manually set focus distance taught me more about composition than years of letting algorithms decide

been using this ricoh camera for a month. not because i wanted better image quality but because my iphone makes photography too convenient to be creative

still figuring out whether this attachment comes from the tool itself or from earning understanding through friction

makes me wonder if great design isn't about removing all difficulty but making the hard parts worth learning www.jpham.space/posts/subpa...

been using this ricoh camera for a month. not because i wanted better image quality but because my iphone makes photography too convenient to be creative

we assume good tools should work perfectly out of the box. but the ricoh's difficulty forced me to learn every setting, every button, every workaround

now i can switch between freezing motion and creating blur without thinking. the controls live where my hands expect them. muscle memory built through frustration

been using this ricoh camera for a month. not because i wanted better image quality but because my iphone makes photography too convenient to be creative

the camera has objectively terrible autofocus. forces me to use zone focusing instead. this surprised me: the limitation made me understand depth of field better than any tutorial

spent hours mapping custom controls. shutter speed to one dial, aperture to another, snap focus to a side button. not because it's efficient but because setup creates attachment

henryzoo.comThe Limits and "Good" of Public GoodsHenry's Zoo

22 Aug 2025

go read henryzoo.com/limits/