Forged Notes
Working notes from the workshop — what got built, what broke, and what it taught. One chronological feed; formal write-ups carry a publication badge.
I Made Claude Code Think Out Loud
Claude Code writes its reasoning to a file on disk, live, while it works. I turned that file into a radio station — neural voices, karaoke word tracking, full session replay — in one day. Build log, measured facts, and the Windows gotchas.
Four phases, a calm meter, late anyway
Chaining Requirements → Design → Build → Test: the handoff trap renders on schedule, and a spec prediction about crunch inverts at the defaults.
Rebuilding WDWTWA: a living site for a music collective in one day
WordPress to Next.js in a working day — asset salvage via the WP REST API, a Discord-to-site publishing pipeline, and a 3D gallery. What worked, what broke, and what the platform APIs will actually let you do in 2026.
A thousand replays, zero on time
Monte Carlo over the simulator's rework engine: the naive plan's on-time probability is 0.000, and the whole game lives on a cliff between 1× and 2× the plan.
Brooks's law emerged; nobody scripted it
The resource-management pack shipped with zero engine changes — and 'adding people to a late project makes it later' fell out of the flow structure.
First playtest: "I don't get it, it's not a game"
I built a rigorous simulation of why projects fail, sat down as my own first player, and the verdict was correct.
Welcome to GDX — and the punch-list fix
Naming the corporation, writing 36 task cards where tone is the tell, and turning an endgame rounding bug into a teaching surface.
Heavy tails and landmines: the individual-employee layer
What the 90/10 folk rule actually has behind it, an identity move that kept 83 tests green untouched, and a fired engineer's fading fingerprints.
Risk events only bite in the tail
Designing the incident-card layer: a measured surprise about when shocks matter, a zero-new-seams discipline, and insurance that is exactly testable.
Corporate satire as a game mechanic
The task-card copy table where a voice direction started doing mechanical work — plus three findings the game layer produced about audits, boomerangs, and an empty win band.
The scariest thing on the screen is a mathematical identity
First UI pass on the simulator: four screenshot moments, the status-line copy, and a hidden-debt visual that needed no invention.
The plan lies to you on the exact day it comes due
First runs of the simulator's rework engine: the 90% plateau, crunch that manufactures 24 extra days, and a spec falsified within ten minutes.
The trap is the tutorial
The PM simulator needed no staged tutorial: the engine's own default run already betrays the player on schedule.
Getting Started with AI Tools in Engineering
My journey exploring how AI assistants like Claude can augment engineering workflows and boost productivity.