Weeknotes vol 7: Here ye here ye, Braindrop hath reached 100 commits
By Garrett,
Another week down the hatch.
As I said last week, we made big progress on the Web/Mac app design, and I wanted to get the prototype updated as soon as possible so that we could interact with the design decisions and make future desisions from there. So, I spent most of the week polishing the Web/Mac prototype. On Monday I added 25 issues to GitHub and by Friday had gotten through 23 of them.
Funny thing about software that you don’t realize until you’re building it is the complexity multiple that comes with every little thing. We’ve pulled the MVP back to the bones, and there’s still quite a bit more to work through than anticipated.
Speaking of MVP, for the time being we’re replacing thought processing with the Web Share API so that you can quickly process your thoughts into whatever application you’re already using. It’s easy to work with but it has it’s quirks:
More like, is literally always ignored by the target.
In other words, if I say title: <%= escape_javascript(thought.content) %>, they say it equals <% content_for :title, "Home" %>. If I’m missing something please tell me.
Matt made his inaugural commits to the codebase and is building a test suite to ensure everything we expect to be true is true and everything we expect to be false is false. This pushed me to make the extensive list of expected functionality (and whatever the opposite of that is) that I’ve been putting off for the last few weeks.
I also celebrated commit #100 and updated Ruby to 3.4.3
The prototype is now at a place where I’m using it as my primary thought and task tracking application, and Phil’s been able to use it to continue on with the interaction details.
Like this? Get email updates or grab the RSS feed like it’s 2008.
More from the blog
-
Apple’s bicycle without a chain
Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.In early 2025, Xe Iaso published a [piece that landed like a brick through a window](https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/) in the Apple developer community. The argument was simple and damning: Apple had built the holy grail of trusted compute with Private Cloud Compute, a genuinely unprecedented piece of security infrastructure, only to fill it with half-baked not…
-
Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday.I stopped writing these [about a year ago](/blog/weeknotes-16/) when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.In summary: [Iain](/blog/iain/) joined full time, we're helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we're having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I've been down since HTML/…
-
The ten trillion dollar gamble
In November 2025, on stage at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event, the chief financial officer of OpenAI was asked how her company planned to honor roughly $1.4 trillion in compute contracts on $13 billion of revenue. Sarah Friar said she was looking to assemble a network of banks, private equity, and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee." By the following evening, she had posted to LinkedIn explaining that "backstop" had muddied the point, that what she meant was something more like a public-private partnership, and that the United States government has been "incredibly forward-leaning" …
-
Never talk about goblins
Buried in a JSON file that OpenAI [posted to GitHub recently](https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/66b0781502be5de3b1909525c987643b9e5e407d/codex-rs/models-manager/models.json), inside the configuration for its newest coding agent, sits an instruction that reads like a footnote written by someone losing their composure. “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The line appears [more than once](https://gizmodo.com/never-talk-about-goblins-openais-instructions-to-…
-
Read the frickin’ manual: the end of the user interface
When a new sales rep joins a company, whilst manuals and process documents probably exist somewhere in varying degrees of obsolescence, in practice the rep just asks where the opportunity stage field lives. Someone on the team shows them. A few months in, the same rep is teaching the next hire. The institutional knowledge of how to use the CRM reproduces itself like a folk song.But agents do not pick up folk songs. They read the documentation, the tool description, the parameter schema, and whatever else has been put in front of them in machine-readable form. If a piece of operating knowledge…
