Notes

Write-ups on things I build. Component teardowns, the apps behind them, and a few opinions I'll probably change.

herdr remote on desktop and phone: the session list with a running subagent, and that subagent's own chat on desktop.

Nov 8, 20264 min read

Approving Claude Code from my phone

My agents run for twenty minutes, then stop to ask one question while I'm away from the desk. So I made herdr remote, a small Node server on my PC and a web app I install on my phone. It shows every agent session, and from there I can answer prompts, read the conversation or open the real terminal.

A cancel-booking dialog open over two identical buttons, one marked broken and one marked fixed, with a note reading: Most dialogs ship with the same handful of mistakes.

Components

Oct 18, 20265 min read

Component Teardown #1: Dialog

The mistakes that show up in almost every dialog, sheet and drawer: animations that never play, backdrops out of sync, clipped forms on phones, confirms that hang. What goes wrong, the better approach, how the libraries compare, and a checklist.

The Goals table of an initiative, with baseline, target, now and progress per goal, and the card 12 of 14 goals on target tilted over its corner.

My apps

Oct 15, 20266 min read

Did the process change work?

Teams change how they work and then guess whether it helped. Measuring it meant a one-off script, a baseline pasted into a doc, and a re-read a quarter later. So I built an Azure DevOps hub that does it: goals with frozen targets, guardrails, and the numbers week by week.

A Critical file's diff in the Guide tab, ticked for the Critical check, with the chapter card Session cookie in the API tilted over its corner.

My apps

Oct 14, 20264 min read

A guide on every pull request

Azure DevOps lists a PR's files in folder order, so the first ten minutes of every big review go to working out what it even does. So I built a Guide tab: what the PR does, the order to read it in, and which part needs care.

The Checklist group on a work item, 4 of 5 done, with a board card for the same item showing Checklist 4/5.

My apps

Oct 6, 20263 min read

A checklist on every work item

Azure Boards has no checklist. Steps end up as a list in the description or a pile of child Tasks. So I built a small extension: a checklist group on the work item form, with default items per work item type.

The AS Agency homepage, "Websites that work while you don't.", with a +318% more bookings card tilted over its corner.

My apps

Oct 6, 20263 min read

AS Agency, the studio I run after hours

Next to my day job I run AS Agency, a one-person studio building websites and web apps for small businesses. It just got a new site, a new logo and a sharper pitch: websites that work while you don't.

The pen.dev canvas with this site's page designs, the agent panel on the left and a note asking to tighten the stack cards.

Opinions

Sep 28, 20262 min read

Designing where the code lives

Every design round used to mean exporting from one tool, describing it to my agent in another, and fixing what got lost in between. With pen.dev, Claude Code pulls the design straight in through an MCP server, so a round takes minutes instead of an afternoon.

An invoices dashboard with numbered boxes marking UI differences and a note reading: Heading is 20px semibold; the design uses 28px bold.

My apps

Sep 26, 20263 min read

Pointing agents at the right pixels

DOM selectors weren't enough when I was directing my agent to fix UI, I needed reference designs too. So I built ui-divergence-feedback: put a Figma frame, a site or a screenshot next to what Claude Code built, box the differences, send.

My apps

Sep 12, 20263 min read

How much AI did I use today?

I run Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor and Gemini, and kept hitting limits because I had no idea where I was with any of them. So I made a small tray app that shows live quotas and cost for every agent I run, on Windows and macOS.