Notes on building, identity, AI, and the things that keep me up at night.
I built widening into OpenApe from the start — into the agent, client-side, because I thought the agent was the intelligence and would know what it needed next. It never used it. How I realized widening belongs with the user, not the agent — and what came out of that.
My agent wants to run a command as root. It has no sudo entry, no password, nothing in /etc/sudoers. That's by design. Here's the path I built so it can execute exactly one command — approved by a human, audited, not cacheable, not reusable.
Same question, asked twice. Two different answers. Two releases. An article about structural metadata anchors, sendmail's EX_TEMPFAIL from 1983, turn-based chat architecture limits, and the moment I asked my agent twice why it ignored me — with two disturbingly clear answers.
Last weekend I thought my grant-secured shell was done. On Sunday I built a notification for the one remaining weak point. On Monday, during the first real end-to-end test, I found a whole set of problems — and realized that one of them wasn't a bug but a design decision I had made backwards. An article about hypotheses that all shared the same wrong assumption, and the moment you realize you're debugging at the wrong level.
When you build a shell wrapper that controls a persistent bash across multiple commands, you stumble into a surprisingly deep question: when is bash done with the current command? A small deep dive into prompt markers, PROMPT_COMMAND, and why the answer isn't to read PS1 — but to override it.
Back in November I wanted to build a Nuxt module for WebAuthn passkeys. Today OpenApe is 10 npm packages, 2 Nuxt modules, a protocol spec, and a desktop app. A story about problems that hide other problems.