Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 23, 2026

mtlynch.io

Worked on my annual review post
Standardized the structure of my annual update summaries
Switched to the binary release of wordword rather than building from source every time in CI
- Reduced CI job from 2m44s to just 18s
Experimented with merging book reports into notes section
Remove bluesky embeds from an old post
Updated the URL structure for annual review posts so that it’s /bootstrapped-founder-year-X rather than /solo-developer-year-X
- I stopped saying “Solo Developer” in year 4, but I kept the URL structure for legacy
- I realized it was a good job for an LLM to update everything and add aliases for the old paths
Updated dates on Refactoring English so it doesn’t look like work stopped in 2025

Refactoring English

Published new chapter: “Structure Your Work to Stay in Flow State”
Added email alerts when a webhook request fails to create a new subscriber in my early access mailing list
Added minor fixes to the brevity chapter
Added nix build targets for git pre-commit scripts
Added a workaround for Buttondown’s firewall
- It was rejecting some subscribers because if I don’t specify an IP address for them, Buttondown assigns them the IP address of the server making the API request, which is a random EC2 instance
- The workaround was to use an arbitrary sentinel IP address and then add it to Buttondown’s firewall allowlist
- Complained to Buttondown about this design
Switched to the binary release of wordword

Little Moments

Little Moments is an open-source web app I’m working on to replace the current family photo sharing app (TinyBeans) I used (which I strongly dislike).

Made more progress on the design doc

LLM Sandbox

Added Claude Code to the sandbox
Added bash completion and history to the sandbox environment
Experimented with exe.dev, a paid, managed LLM sandbox
- I really like it!
- It ships with Codex and Claude Code, but it also has its own agent that you can access on the web, and it’s mobile friendly
- It’s really fun having the LLM do stuff from my phone
- The biggest downside is that the sandbox is fairly resource-constrained at only 2 vCPUs / 8 GB RAM / 25 GB disk
  - Compare to sprites.dev, which is 8 vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 91 GB NVMe
- I use a dedicated SSH key and configured SSH to only offer that identity
  - Protects me from rogue LLM acting with a more powerful SSH identity
- I move code in and out by setting my VM as a git remote from my local system and git push and git pulling code to and from the VM.
  - Not perfect, and I don’t have a smooth flow yet
Added mounting as read-only for my host system’s git config directory
- That way, commits in the sandbox have my name / email

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

Had an LLM find ways to take advantage of recent Go releases
Update flake.nix to document nixhub
Updated to playwright 1.57.0
Fixed .prettierignore to ignore e2e-results dir

fusion is an open-source RSS reader I found when looking for an RSS aggregator to host on my NixOS system. I like that it’s written in Go and uses SQLite as a backend, so it’s pretty easy to self-host. The maintainer is very responsive to PRs as well.

Had an LLM try overhauling the app to replace Svelte with vanilla HTML
- It worked pretty well!
- I might pursue this, but I want to figure out a better strategy for testing it through the migration.

Zestful

Tried having an LLM convert from CRF++ to spaCy
- I set up a really complicated architecture so that my Python code could call the C++ code, and it would be way simpler if I just used spaCy instead, as it’s already in Python.
- I don’t actually want to tinker too much with Zestful because I don’t think I can grow the business at all that way, but I’m mainly curious to see how much LLMs can do
- I can’t tell how close it is because I’m so out of practice
Tried some other repo cleanup stuff to make it more consistent with my other Python repos

Zestful website

Converted the whole site from Vue to vanilla HTML in Hugo
- A 12 kLOC reduction!
- I got an annoying notification about an npm package update, and I thought, “What if I just have an LLM replace the whole thing?”
- It mostly got everything right, but I had to manually fix a few things like the site title and language
Improved the navbar design
- Before
- After
Reduced image sizes
Upgraded to node.js 20 and add Nix flake
Update VS Code settings to format markdown, too

go-evolutionary-migrate

I saw someone else created a simple SQLite migration library and realized I keep copy/pasting the same file to every project, and I could extract it to a reusable Go module.

Migrated go-app-starter to use this library
Migrated logpaste to use this library

wordword

Published release 0.1.2
Updated to Zig 0.15.1
Removed woodpecker CI and switched nix run targets to build packages so they can run on NixCI
Took another pass at shifting Markdown processing to the third-party zigdown package

Talk to Stan

Talk to Stan is a tool I’m working on that will respond to templated emails I get from spammy marketers and recruiters with a sequence of templated responses to ask the spammers an endless series of dumb questions.

Used sql.Named to replace SQL ? placeholders
Added an AGENTS.md
Started work replacing Postmark’s inbound mail API with a real smtp daemon
- Postmark changed their plans so it’s no longer on the basic tier
- Postmark also is owned by a company I dislike, so I’m glad to move away
Simplified requireEnv to use log.Fatalf instead of returning error

Pointer Brother

Pointer Brother is a utility app I use for quick screenshot and image manipulation.

Added e2e tests with playwright
Refactored serve script to move logic from Nix to bash
Removed unused static-server package from Nix flake
Added a NixCI badge

podofo

Tried running my PDF fuzzing workflow on PoDoFo PDF reader and found a crash
- Though it’s probably not exploitable

MeshCore

Tested device range from a few miles away on a mountain

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

Finished replacing bulma with bootstrap5
Consolidated e2e npm dependencies into root package.json
- This was the only project where I tried to separate them, and it always got me confused about where Playwright was coming from
Made e2e test more robust for time zone differences
Added an AGENTS.md
Fixed tsconfig for e2e tests
Updated to playwright 1.57.0

LogPaste

Ported e2e tests from Cypress to Playwright
Switched to installing litestream from the official docker image
Fixed the deploy step to match latest flyctl semantics
Upgraded Go to 1.25.4

resticpy

Gave feedback on a proposal to stream output

beancount-chase-bank

Pinned Python environment to Python 3.13
Created an AGENTS.md
Had an LLM update all my PyPI dependencies.
- It worked great!
- Update coverage to 7.13.1
- Update isort to 7.0.0
- Update pylint to 4.0.4
- Update pytest to 9.0.2

NixOS Config

Added a local NixOS module for running sprites.dev
- Seems to kind of work, but I get logged out
- Not sure if it’s my bug or sprites.dev’s bug given that it’s brand new
Add safety checks to ensure I only mount my code repos or a directory under /tmp
- I realized how easy it would have been to accidentally load an LLM in my home directory and accidentally give it access to way too much stuff.

Misc

Vibe coded a fix to a bug with the UI on Android Firefox
Tried using LLMs to set up fuzzing for VLC, but it got pretty messy and didn’t find anything.
- It’s so messy that I’m not even sure if I’m fuzzing actual VLC code or just the glue code the LLM wrote
Switched go-app-starter from WoodpeckerCI to Nix CI
Finished reading The Phoenix Project