tcash.ca · field dispatches
The archive · every dispatch & reading
fredericton, nb filed_
tcash.ca · the archive

ARCHIVE.ca

Every dispatch and every reading, in one drawer.

The home page shows only what's newest. This is the full drawer: the dated dispatches in the ledger, and the library of readings and reference texts they're drawn from. Nothing here expires just because it stopped being new.

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§ 01 · The Ledger

Dated dispatches

11 filed
Showing 11 of 11 filed
31 MAY2026
Don't wait for Enter

A routine is just a Claude Code session that triggers itself. Field notes on trigger, context, and steerability, plus a work order builder you fill in and copy.

Field Notes8 min▸
29 MAY2026
The Verification Tax

The agent can produce more than you can responsibly inspect. The next skill is keeping verification cheaper than generation.

Reports12 min▸
19 MAY2026
Stop handing me the markdown your agent had to fight

Six months of defaulting to HTML for plans, reviews, and diagrams: what changed, what broke, and the one carve-out I keep. A reply to Thariq and Kurtis Redux.

Reports14 min▸
14 MAY2026
The CLAUDE.md I actually keep

Twenty-one rules went in. Five survived contact with real work, and one of them was “write less here.”

Config9 min▸
06 MAY2026
Four moves for a stuck agent

When the loop stalls, I reach for the same four corrections, in order, before I touch the prompt.

Workflow7 min▸
28 APR2026
Annotated PR review, in one file

An HTML diff with the reviewer’s notes pinned in the margin beats a comment thread every single time.

Code Review6 min▸
19 APR2026
Kimi K2.6, two weeks in

Where the cheaper agent holds, where it folds, and how its prompting wants to be shaped differently.

Field Test11 min▸
10 APR2026
Reading like Karpathy

Treat the agent as a study partner, not a vending machine. A reading method that survives long sessions.

Research8 min▸
30 MAR2026
How OpenAI actually uses Codex

Notes from how a shop that ships every day delegates to its agents, and where the humans stay.

Field Notes10 min▸
22 MAR2026
Meta-prompting, the Garry Tan way

Ask the model to write the prompt before you write the task. Why the extra hop earns its keep.

Technique5 min▸
14 MAR2026
The seven crossings

Seven points where a human still has to step into the agent’s loop, and what each one costs you.

Essay12 min▸
05 MAR2026
Learning on the shop floor

Skill compounds where the work happens, not in the docs. A case for letting the agent watch you work.

Essay9 min▸
§ 02 · The Library

Readings & references

16 on the shelf

The dispatches don't come from nowhere. These are the pieces behind them: field readings of the corpus I work from, and the reference texts they argue with. Undated by design; they're a shelf, not a feed.

Field readings 11 pieces
What the library already knows Twenty-four files on the shelf, read end to end and squeezed for what survives: the cross-cutting ten first, then by cluster, then a per-file ledger so nothing's dropped.
~24 min
Eighteen articles the corpus does not have yet A ranked accessions register of outside voices, counter-evidence, pricing data, and measured studies that patch the shelf's four self-diagnosed gaps.
~25 min
Where the techniques break The missing half of every how-to here: not how things fail without the technique, but how each technique itself fails. A boundary survey, written from inside the tribe.
~15 min
Inside karpathy/autoresearch A field manual for the overnight loop: how an agent runs ~100 experiments while you sleep, and the surfaces that keep it honest.
~20 min
Four surfaces, eight models Default surface vocabularies across eight models, and the behavioral connections between them.
~27 min
Twenty-one rules for the file Claude reads first CLAUDE.md, beyond the developer use case: the long version of the rules that made the cut.
~19 min
Four rules for an agent that codes The Karpathy-Skills specimen sheet: fat skills, fat code, thin harness.
~12 min
Getting the most out of Codex A close reading of how to brief Codex so it finishes the job instead of the first step.
~13 min
Using Codex goals effectively Goal mode, read carefully: PLAN.md as program, EXPERIMENTS.md as the ledger that survives.
~11 min
Driving the browser, four ways A comparative study of four ways to put an agent behind a browser, and where each one breaks.
~9 min
sqlc, explained Tools, demystified: what sqlc actually does to your queries, and why it earns its build step.
~6 min
Reference texts 5 pieces
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML The source essay this blog argues with: Thariq's case for HTML as the default canvas between you and your agent.
~11 min
HTML effectiveness: specimen catalog The companion catalog: what the HTML-first outputs actually look like, specimen by specimen.
~6 min
Prompting best practices: Claude Reference: prompting guidance for Claude's latest models, kept on the shelf for lookups.
~35 min
Best practices for prompts: Moonshot AI Reference: Moonshot's own prompting guide for the Kimi models.
~10 min
Project instructions for “Format as html” The colophon piece: the project instructions that produce these very pages.
~19 min