2026-05-06 08:00:00
I recently watched a video that put a name on something I'd been feeling. The author splits an LLM's context window into two zones. There's the smart zone, where the model is sharp, and the dumb zone, where attention drops off and the model starts forgetting what you told it five minutes ago. The cutoff sits somewhere around 100k tokens. It doesn't matter how big the advertised context window is.
This matters because coding agents will happily walk you straight into the dumb zone. A modern agent burns through tokens fast. A few file reads, a long debug session, a sprawling test run, and you're at 100k before lunch. Meanwhile vendors keep advertising windows of 200k, 1M, even 2M, as if those numbers represented a usable working set. They don't. Studies like RULER and Chroma's report on context rot show that effective context is a fraction of the advertised number, and that performance degrades gradually as you fill the window.
Large context windows are mostly a marketing number. The architectures behind them work, but they paper over a problem the underlying attention mechanism doesn't really solve. The number on the box gets bigger every release. The usable part doesn't keep up.
Modern agents are getting smart about this. Tools like Claude Code now auto-compact: when the session gets long, the agent summarizes the history and starts fresh. That helps. But auto-compaction kicks in after you've already spent time in the dumb zone, and the summary is itself produced by a model that's already degraded. Better than nothing, but I'd rather avoid the situation altogether.
What I do is open a new session and pass it a spec I wrote myself. That's a much higher signal handoff than any automated summary, because I get to decide what matters going forward. It's the breadcrumb approach applied to agents. Leave an artifact that the next session, or the next person, can pick up cleanly.
You can take this further. Projects like obra/superpowers and mattpocock/skills structure entire agent workflows around small, named artifacts. PRDs, plans, skills, sub-agent handoffs. Each one is a way to keep the working session in the smart zone by deliberately moving information out of the session into something the next session can read.
So I treat my context window like a budget. I assume only the first chunk is really working for me, and everything I can move out of the live session and into a written artifact is one less thing for attention to fight over.
2026-02-13 08:00:00
n8n-nodes-open5e is an n8n community node that lets you access D&D 5th edition SRD content from the Open5e API in your n8n workflows.
The Open5e node provides access to 12 different D&D 5e resources through the Open5e API. Each resource supports three operations:
Create random encounters by fetching monsters filtered by challenge rating:
5
wotc-srd
Build a Discord bot that looks up spell information:
={{ $json.spellName }}
Search for magic items and weapons by name:
={{ $json.query }}
10
This is my first n8n community node. Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request or open an issue if you encounter any issues.
2026-02-11 08:00:00
From my notebook:
Brains are pattern recognition machines.
I seek structure, sometimes meta-structure.
I try to structure how I structure things.
Projects, stories and adventures often only become apparent when they are in the past.
They evolve naturally, organically. Starting a project can result in something completely different. Is there a structure in that?
I am trying to find structure again.
Life is chaotic, and that's okay.
I had this on my mind for quite some time. I'm trying to cope with chaos in my life. I like chaos, and I like turning chaos into order. But often, that does not work and I get frustrated.
Projects - no matter if programming, writing, planning an event or woodworking - are inherently chaotic. There is no structure in the concept of a "project". I want to think of a project as the sum of threads of actions towards a goal, and life is the sum of every project you ever started. I try to find a way to capture and grasp these "threads" - like commits on different branches of a code repository. On projects other than programming, this utterly fails.
I have to keep telling myself to be fine with the fact that life does not follow a structure. My personal takeaway is learning to recognize when I am seeking structure as a response to anxiety vs. when I'm doing it because it's actually useful.
Am I alone with this? Does this resonate with anyone out there? I'd love to hear from you.
2026-02-04 08:00:00
Long-pressing j or k (think "down" or "up" in Vim) only results in one down or up action, instead of continuous scrolling.
In a terminal, run the following command:
defaults write com.microsoft.VSCode ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
Original post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44010683
In the MacOS settings, set "Key Repeat Rate" and "Delay Until Repeat" to the highest setting to be able to scroll much faster.
<img width="478" height="92" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7bf85853-377d-4727-a5c8-2766f2794e8a" />
2026-02-03 08:00:00
The Scientific Method is widely accepted among researchers and academics to be the de facto standard of establishing truth.
Lately, I was wandering if parts of the scientific method could more often be applied to every day life. There are many different resources out there explaining the scientific method, often with examples of how to apply it outside of an academic environment. The core method is always the same (in this case, taken from sciencebuddies.org):
- Ask a Question
- Do Background Research
- Construct a Hypothesis
- Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
- Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
- Communicate Your Results
Related: To prove something is true, try disproving it first
2026-02-02 08:00:00
The Cult of Done Manifesto is a fascinating way of embracing a chaotic mind. I copied the 13 golden rules into my very first pocket notebook and stumble upon them from time to time.
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
