Why Parallelogramist
There’s a particular kind of writing I keep wishing existed and rarely find: someone showing you the actual machinery of how they work with these tools. Not the demo. Not the thread that ends at “the future is here.” The seams — what broke, what they ripped out a week later, the boring config that made the magic reliable.
So I’m going to write it.
The setup
I don’t sit and grind through everything myself. The center of it is a small always-on box — the quiet machine that runs the things that need to be up when I’m not. On it lives a fleet of coding agents that take turns on my repositories: they pick up work, make changes, run tests, and commit, mostly while I’m away from the desk. I check in from my phone and a watch, the lightest glanceable surfaces, and step in only at the decisions that are mine to make.
The name is the thesis. A parallelogram is a shape made of parallel sides, pushed off-square. That’s what this feels like: work happening in parallel, off to the side, while I’m doing something else — never the “normal” rectangle of sitting at a desk grinding through it alone. Work on several tracks at once, slightly skewed.
What this is actually about
The surfaces are the fun part, but they’re not the point. The point is a loop.
Underneath all of it I run a self-improving system whose only job is to hand me back time and then get out of the way. Each cycle it looks at where my time actually went, scores a backlog of things I could automate by value returned divided by what it costs to keep alive, and proposes exactly one thing to build next. I pick one — or I pick nothing, which is allowed and often correct. It builds the thing as something reversible. It keeps what earns its place and retires what rots.
The trick that makes it safe is small and load-bearing: maintenance cost lives in the denominator. Anything that needs constant babysitting scores low and prunes itself. A system meant to give you time can’t be allowed to quietly become the thing that eats it. So the reclaimed time is the headline metric, not a dashboard full of charts — and that time goes back to my family by default, which is the whole reason any of this exists.
What you’ll find here
Three things:
- The stack — the always-on box, the agent fleet, and the few surfaces I check in from. The uses page is the inventory; the writing is the real account.
- The loop — the method for deciding what’s even worth automating, which I think is more reusable than any single automation.
- The projects — a 24/7 AI radio station, a searchable history app, an AI-news aggregator, the operator dashboards. What they do, how they’re built, what I got wrong.
What’s here, and what’s coming
The goal is simple and a little selfish: explain these projects well enough that you could go build your own version. So each one gets a real write-up — what it does, how it’s wired together, and where I tripped over my own feet.
The source is rolling out too. As I open each repo on GitHub, its link lands right on the project’s card — no gatekeeping, just a queue I’m working through. The handful of things that stay off the site are the boring-private ones: home-network details, family, secrets. Not a transparency flex — they’re simply not the fun part.
So: real projects, explained plainly, with the code following close behind. Take what’s useful and go build something.