β» /insane-defaults Β· the skunkworks shelf
these are the essays I haven't written yet β but I keep walking around in. each one is a tease. when one drops it'll show up at /gospel. until then, the corner of my brain that wrote them is publicly available below.
Why you're afraid to close that tab. And the small ritual that fixes it.
There are 41 windows open on my desktop. Each one feels load-bearing. Spoiler: only three of them are. Here's a one-page protocol I run every morning that drops the count to single digits β without losing context.
The two-religion war inside every power user's head.
Customization buys you a magical-feeling but brittle workflow. Defaults buy you a boring but portable one. The fix isn't picking a side β it's knowing which mode you're in this Tuesday.
A bridge protocol for stealing the best note editor I've used in years.
Most Raycast users haven't realized that Notes is, quietly, the best lightweight editor on the Mac. Here's the rough sketch of a system that exposes its UX to every other app I write in. Yes, I'm trying to fork it.
On the terror of getting good at the wrong tool.
Every keybinding you internalize today taxes every alternative tomorrow. I have a folder of muscle-memory I regret. Here's how I now decide what's worth burning into my fingers.
What I built when Claude met a launcher hotkey.
Confetti plus extensions, custom commands that pipe selectionβClaudeβback into the launcher. A 30-day burndown of what works, what scaled, and what I had to rip out twice.
On the seductive failure mode of throwing out your knowledge base.
Every six months I declare cache-invalidation bankruptcy and start a new map of content. The vault you're reading right now is V14 (allegedly). Here's the protocol for keeping the next one alive past month three.
β» ASCII rant generator
βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
β "tweak vs. simplify" β an unending civil war β
β inside every power-user's head β
βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
β
ββββββββββββββ΄ββββββββββββ
βΌ βΌ
βββ TWEAK βββ βββ SIMPLIFY βββ
brittle Β· magical portable Β· boring
great for one great for sixty
β
ββββββββββββββ΄ββββββββββββ
βΌ βΌ
hyper-mode keymaps vanilla shortcuts
custom sketchybar stock menubar
skhd + yabai raycast + nothing
β
βΌ
which mode are you in?
(the answer is "different on tuesdays")