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.mdwith the same contents asAGENTS.md.- I didn’t realize until then that Claude was ignoring my
AGENTS.md
- I didn’t realize until then that Claude was ignoring my
- Switched to using
CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKENinstead of sharing a.claude.jsonfile across containers- The different containers were corrupting each other’s
.claude.jsonfiles through partial writes CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKENis surprisingly broken, as it doesn’t take effect unless you also setIS_DEMO=true
- The different containers were corrupting each other’s
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