I spent the summer talking to engineering leaders about how AI adoption is playing out in their organizations. Each conversation had rhyming anecdotes. Effectiveness is jagged. Every team has an AI-whisperer managing agent swarms and pushing dozens of parallel tasks. They are thrilled to reinvent their workflow every other week when a new S-tier model drops. The rest of the team is tired of the treadmill, more interested in just getting their jobs done. A team’s impact ceiling is higher than ever before but the floor hasn’t come up with it.

Sometimes I am surprised by how quickly I’m running through Claude session limits. Until now I had no good way to understand it.

Context Lens is a local proxy that sits between your coding agent and the LLM API. It captures every request and shows you what’s filling your context window — system prompts, tool definitions, conversation history, tool results, thinking blocks. No code changes. Just point your tool at the proxy and go.

This is the first in a series of posts where I walk through my agentic coding setup. In this episode I give a high-level overview of my stack — the tools, how they fit together, and why I’ve landed on this particular combination.

Links

• My Nix configuration — Nix configuration for the Lima VM and my other hosts
• Lima — Dev VM creation
• Secret proxy — The secret proxy I use to inject secrets into the VM
• Sprites — A hosted sandbox option
• Jujutsu — Alternative VCS compatible with Git
• Pi — A wonderful agentic coding harness

YouTube Kids is a major disappointment. Despite a recent refresh the app is buggy and devoid of basic features:

• Videos from subscribed channels doesn’t appear in the app. Viewing the same channel on YouTube shows significantly more videos.
• There’s no way to navigate to subscribed channels and view all of the videos. You can only browse via an algorithmically generated feed.
• Our account is configured to only allow parent-approved content. However, the search feature often returns no results with no explanation why.
• My partner and I are members of the same Family account however she sees different child accounts in her view than I do in mine. We seem to have created a split-brain family account that I can’t figure out how to resolve.

I spent some time over the holiday break figuring out a self-hosted alternative to YouTube Kids that has addressed all of my problems and left me with a more feature-rich alternative. The kids have branded it DadaTube.

On the difference in developing for Rust vs OCaml:

I love Rust. It’s so fast. It’s so beautiful. But you have to do all these types, all these clones, all these lifetimes and it can be really distracting.

When you’re doing something like web development where it’s mostly IO bound, where you’re waiting on the database, where you’re waiting on the HTTP request, where you’re doing all this waiting there is really no point to carry the burden of having to write all these types. Instead you’re in a situation where you’re developing something that you want people to use.