Claude has trouble playing Pokemon partially because it can’t see the screen very well. This made me wonder if Claude would be better at an ASCII game like Dwarf Fortress, where it doesn’t need to rely on image recognition.
To check this, I built an MCP server to let Claude control an interactive terminal, and installed a text version of Dwarf Fortress.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with the newest version of Claude Code, which wrote me a read-it-later service including RSS, email newsletters and an Android app.
Software engineering experience was useful, since I did plan out a lot of the high-level design and data model and sometimes push for simpler designs. Overall though, I mostly felt like a product manager trying to specify features as quickly as possible. While software engineering is more than coding, I’m starting to think Claude is already superhuman at this part.
LLMs learn faster if we first pretrain them to imitate dense teacher-forced examples. I speculated that this would work on humans too, so I built a chess app where you try to imitate Stockfish. My theory is that this will help humans quickly become OK at chess, but they will reach a wall where practice on full games is more efficient than continued pretraining. I also think the app is fun.
This is probably not an efficient way to learn the basic rules of chess, and you’ll need to train openings separately. The idea of chess puzzle apps is hardly unique, but I don’t think anything else works in exactly the same way.
Running Claude Code locally is annoying since you have to deal with permissions and agents interfering with each other (and you have to be at your computer), but running Claude Code on the web is annoying because the cloud environment is so limited.
What if we could run Claude Code for the web but on our machines? Through the magic of Claude Code writing Claude Code code, I made a local app for this.
Announcing Clawed Abode: A web app you can run on your own home computer which runs Claude Code without permission prompts in ephemeral containers, and with the ability to install packages, run containers, use caches, and access the GPU.
I posted a few months ago about vibe-coding an RSS reader. The mood on the internet seems to be that these apps are buggy and never get finished, so I figured it was worth posting an update. Another thousand commits later, Lion Reader supports every feature I care about, works reliably, has very good performance, and is open for public signups.
I’m part of a small Discord server and thought it would be funny to make a Geoguessr-style game where you get presented with a random interesting message from the server and have to guess when, where and by who it was posted.
I recently finished a basic XLSX reader for OCaml and I thought it would be a good time to summarize what’s necessary to make a library like this, since the documentation is complicated and sometimes hard to find.
I emailed the IETF HTTP group about my timeout header idea, and a few people said that RFC 7240’s “wait” preference does what I want. I’m not entirely convinced that this is what was intended by that spec, but it’s close enough. In response, I’ve updated my Express middleware to support the “Prefer” header and “wait” preference.