I had Claude produce a complete daily to-do checklist for me – something like a bullet journal. The results were great, and I’ve been using the program for weeks and it’s definitely helping me stay on track and keep an eye on what I’m doing. The problem was that unlikely everything else I’d had Claude write, I was not competent to review this work. I felt confident it wasn’t going to cause me big problems, but what if I wanted to debug it myself? I realized there was a plausible solution waiting for me…

For years, I’ve wanted a better daily to-do checklist. I had a good idea what I wanted from it, but I knew it was going to be a pain to produce. It didn’t have any complicated ideas, just a bunch of UI considerations, and that’s not my area of expertise, so I’ve made do with a bunch of worse (for me) options, which has, for me, led to worse outcomes. I accepted the tradeoffs, but I wasn’t thrilled. Now I’ve finally built exactly the app I wanted, and it went great. I call it, for now, NerfJournal.

Originally, this was going to be the last in my series of stuff I did with Claude that I found compelling, but… the news, good or bad, is that I’ll be posting at least one more soon. This one, though, is definitely the piece of work that convinced me that Claude was useful for more than mechanical transformation.

Is all my 2026 blogging going to be about doing more random stuff with Claude? No, I promise. But I’m still working through my backlog of “and the next thing I tried to put it through its paces”, so here it comes. This time, more drudgery.

Here’s another post in which I fiddle around with Claude Code and determine that it is not just spewing out nonsense and bugs, but instead is doing kinda what I would’ve done, at least enough to reduce my total effort. This time, writing tests.

I’ve been trying more things with Clade Code, and I want to keep some notes on how it went. This is the second post in a probably-short series about early adventures with the tool.

I’ve been slowly ramping up my use of Claude for coding issues. I’ve been meaning to write a bit more about how I use it, and had been putting that off until I finished a few things. With some of those done, I thought I’d write up some notes on how it’s gone, finally. Over the next little while, I’ll post some actual work I’ve done. Later, I’ll try to write some more sort of general thoughts: other things I might try, what general tactics have felt useful, places where I think things are particularly problematic, and so on.

Yesterday, I posted about the books I read in 2025, which made me remember that I never posted about the (horror) movies we watched in October 2024. So, I thought I’d get around to that. Of course this will be short and lossy, right? It’s been over a year.

I don’t take the Goodreads “reading challenge” too seriously, but I did hit my target last year, and it felt good. I thought I’d try again this year and I did get it done – only just, though, as I finished my last three books in the last two days of the year. I think I would’ve liked to read a bit more through the year, but sometimes I just wasn’t feeling it. So it goes! I think this is a “structure your time” problem, but also it’s not the most pressing thing on my agenda, you know?

It’s December, and I should’ve posted this in early November, but I didn’t. I did other stuff. Now, though, I’m on a long plane flight, so I guess it’s time to write a bit of bloggery. (Did I really never write up 2024? Well, maybe later.)