$ posts

date tag title min
[Technical] CSS hover animations leaving ghost trails on Windows: animate top/left, not transform 4m

If a CSS transform animation leaves stale, discolored streaks on screen, but screenshots taken through the browser look perfectly clean, the bug probably isn't in your CSS at all. It's an OS-level compositing artifact: the browser promoted your animated element to its own GPU layer, and on a fractionally scaled Windows display the operating system's compositor failed to clean up behind that layer. The fix that ended it for me was animating top and left instead of transform, so the layer never exists.

[Showcase] I built a multi-agent AI pipeline that runs an Instagram football page without me 4m

Every morning at 7 AM ET, a five-stage multi-agent pipeline wakes up on Google Cloud, reads about 165 football stories from four sources, argues itself down to the best five, generates a graphic and caption for each, and posts them to Instagram. No human in the loop. The account is live at @football.news_updates_.

[Showcase] Aloud: building a real-time voice AI assistant optimized for conversational latency 12m

Aloud is a voice-first work assistant: you tap one button and your work becomes a conversation with someone who handles the tiny details. Reading becomes an audiobook with an expert inside; it can summarize, recite, or answer questions about what you would otherwise be reading. Writing becomes letting your train of thought run out loud while an assistant puts it down coherently: say "write that up" and a structured document appears on screen while the conversation keeps moving, ready for you to go over a specific line or phrasing, as hands-on or as high level as you want to be. So you can work while out and about. It's live at work-aloud.com.

[Technical] Auth from the ground up: the mental model I wish I'd been handed 8m

Every piece of authentication machinery (cookies, tokens, JWTs, OAuth, middleware, row-level security) exists because HTTP is stateless and someone has to answer two questions on every request: who are you (authentication) and what are you allowed to do (authorization). Nobody taught me auth in that order, I assembled this mental model myself while building aloud, and this is the version I wish someone had handed me.

[Technical] Deploying a real-time WebRTC app from the ground up: DNS, TLS, one VM, and a deploy button 12m

You can't host a WebRTC app on Cloud Run, Vercel, or Railway: their load balancers only route HTTP over TCP, and real-time audio travels over UDP, so the media path simply dies. Deploying aloud meant leaving managed platforms for a bare VM, and assembling, from the ground up, the networking knowledge that managed platforms let you skip. This is that knowledge, organized the way I wish I'd found it.

[Technical] Prompt caching, or why your agent's API bill grows quadratically 5m

Prompt caching lets an LLM provider reuse the computed state of a prompt prefix instead of reprocessing it, cutting the cost of repeated input tokens by roughly 90%. If you're building agents, it's the single highest-leverage line item on your bill, and the easiest one to silently break.

6 files · 45 min total reading time