The Theme Codex is no more, and I do not miss it. That is the theme for this week. This is Week 97 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store, and the app itself is in good shape. What I want to talk about is not the app. It is the development journey, and specifically what happened after I let my Codex subscription lapse on the last day of October....
The Theme The limitation of agentic assistance while traveling: that is the theme for this week. This is Week 96 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store, and the app itself is in good shape. What I want to talk about is not the app. It is the development journey and, specifically, what it looked like to keep it moving while I was away....
Last Week Last week I said I wanted to try a vacation-and-work mode: take a break after walking, sit down with a drink, and use my phone to give the agents some work. This is the first report from that experiment, and it is a short one. This is Week 95 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store....
Last Week Last week, I wanted to turn a promising video-production pilot into a repeatable workflow. I had better-looking Shokken tutorials coming out of Codex, but moving that workflow into Hermes was still taking a lot of hand-holding. This week, I found a trap in asking one agent to teach another: the teaching can sound successful while losing the details that made the original work good. This is Week 94 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool....
Last Week Last week, I was trying to stop the Hermes setup from becoming its own moving target. The next priority was supposed to be Shokken marketing. This week, that brought me to a different problem: how do I produce enough useful videos without personally polishing every step? I want a video assembly line. I do not have one yet. Shokken is available on Android and iOS in the United States....
Last Week Last week, the memory system behind Hermes was finally paying off. OpenViking was helping the agent remember how I like to work, and I was spending less time repeating instructions. I expected that progress to free me up for Shokken marketing. Instead, I spent most of this week trying to get Hermes into a usable state. The problem was not memory this time. It was asking an autonomous team of agents to configure the very installation they were running on, while I was also managing that configuration through Ansible....
Last Week Last week, I was still assembling Hermes as a practical backup for my AI development workflow. The local models were working, OpenViking was connected, and I had learned that one model slot was not enough for every request an agent system makes. I was optimistic, but the setup was not yet fully operational. This week, the memory side of that experiment began to pay off. OpenViking has not made Hermes perfect, but I spend far less time repeating the same instructions....
Last Week Last week, running out of Codex usage showed me how much I depend on AI assistance to keep development moving. I could still investigate a problem manually, but doing so took much longer than the workflow I had become used to. I still see these tools as another useful layer of abstraction. Using them well takes judgment and skills of its own. The problem I need to solve is having so much of my work depend on access to one provider....
Last Week Last week, a network problem with my self-hosted runners interrupted development. This week, I ran into another dependency that could stop me from getting work done: access to the AI tools I now use throughout my workflow. It was a short week. I did not get home until roughly halfway through it, and most of the progress was on marketing and the product launch rather than new app features....
Last Week Last week, I was working through tablet screenshots, keeping the product videos moving, and monitoring a database upgrade in integration. This week, an unexpected infrastructure problem took over: my self-hosted GitHub runners stopped getting through their jobs. Shokken is available in the US on Android and iOS. I am also preparing a reduced introductory Pro offer for the first group of users, but the subscription infrastructure for that offer is not ready yet....