A fresh Mac collects apps fast. These five are the ones still there a month later. Itsycal is the one I put back first: a small icon in the menu bar, and that is the whole reason it stays. Itsycal Itsycal is a tiny menu bar calendar. The icon is a small block with the day of the month in it. Click it and the month drops down. It reads events from Calendar.app, can show the ISO week number, and can stand in for the system clock if you hand it a date pattern. ...
The status line is the one piece of UI I look at every few seconds, all day. So I stopped treating it as a place for a model name and a branch, and made it answer the questions I actually have while I work. Is the context about to compact? Am I burning through my limit faster than the window allows? When does it reset? What has today cost? And what is the weather doing outside? ...
This page is the front door to my dotfiles. It is written for one reader first: me, the next time I am sitting in front of a machine that does not know me yet. If you are someone else, welcome — take whatever is useful. Everything I care about in a terminal is in that repo: zsh with Powerlevel10k, tmux on a Ctrl+a prefix, Neovim through LazyVim, Ghostty in Catppuccin Mocha, lazygit, a git config that signs every commit, and the settings for the AI agents I work with every day, including a Claude Code status line that gets the bill right. None of it is copied into place. It is linked, so the repo stays the only copy, and a change on one machine is a git pull away from every other. ...
I build AI agents for a living, and the single most useful thing I’ve done for them is stop giving them big interfaces. No SDKs. No sprawling APIs. No MCP servers with twenty tools registered at boot. Instead I give them what Unix gave us forty years ago: small, sharp, isolated CLI tools they can compose. One job each. Text in, text out. That’s the whole methodology. This post is the short version of why. ...