Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 6, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Started Feb 2026 retro
• Added route aliases for other common RSS routes (/feed, /rss)
  • People kept emailing me to ask if I had an RSS feed, and I kept wanting to say, “Yes, check the HTML!” but I guess I am actually using a not very common URL for it.
• Fixed some dead links
• Added a link to design docs chapter in my Refactoring English ad
• Added a link to the other NixOS on Oracle cloud guide

Refactoring English

• Published Why Improve Your Writing?
• Organzied a design review for my Little Moments design doc as practice in design docs
• Added regional pricing for Croatia
• Made it easier to use my video call scheduling script
• Added notes about using AI to review design docs
• Worked on fixing SVG rendering in dark mode epubs

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).

• Completed v1 design doc
  • As HTML

Grosiree

Grosiree is a shared grocery list web app I’m making with my wife to show her how vibecoding works.

• Changed sorting for in-cart items to be oldest to newest
  • I realized that if I accidentally check something off my list, it’s hard to find it in my cart because I can’t see what I added last
  • I also realized that my “to buy” list is helpful to keep categorized by section, but that doesn’t matter for my “in cart” list, so I got rid of category sections
  • Now, if I accidentally click something in my “to buy” list, I know that it’s the top item in my cart

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.

• Updated the one-line description in my README
  • I used it as an example of how to write in a reader-centric way in Refactoring English and noticed opportunities to improve it.

NixOS Config

• Switched from git-crypt to sops for secret management, inspired by Secret Management on NixOS with sops-nix (2025)
  • It’s surprisingly convoluted. There’s a lot of plumbing you have to do to pass through the secret/file to different parts of the Nix config, so it’s a little annoying, but AI is good at helping.
  • It’s neat to use Linux systems’ host keys for encryption, as I kind of forget that they can do that.
  • The upside is that I’m no longer storing secrets in my nix store
  • The next thing I’d like to do is set up a local Nix cache on my NAS and let all my systems share it, including my AI sandboxes, as I’m frequently rebuilding the same long binaries across systems.

AI Sandbox

• Raised pid limit to 8192 because the podman default of 2048 was causing my containers to run out of PIDs on fuzz jobs
• Updated container plumbing so that we also generate a CLAUDE.md with the same contents as AGENTS.md.
  • I didn’t realize until then that Claude was ignoring my AGENTS.md
• Switched to using CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN instead of sharing a .claude.json file across containers
  • The different containers were corrupting each other’s .claude.json files through partial writes
  • CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN is surprisingly broken, as it doesn’t take effect unless you also set IS_DEMO=true

Exploding Servers

Exploding Servers is a side project I’m not sure I’ll ever release, but I use it as a personal tool for launching VMs with a strict expiration time.

• Switched the NixOS module to use a secret management strategy that’s friendlier to sops-nix

Misc

• Had call with another indie dev author
• Started disabling dependabot in my github repos, inspired by Turn Dependabot Off
  • The signal to noise was terrible on security issues
  • I actually don’t care that much about keeping pip packages up to date
  • It used to be a pain to catch up to modern versions after ignoring package updates for a year or two, but now AI is really good at updating, so I don’t care about merging new package updates every week
  • Turned it off for beancount-chase-bank
  • Turned it off for python3_seed