https://ryan.net/blog/ Infrastructure archaeology and other constraints en-us https://ryan.net/blog/2026-06-07-agent-bar.html The coding agents take a break and have some beers after work. A story about architecture, discipline, and the Nelson Stack immune system. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ryan.net/blog/2026-06-07-agent-bar.html http://ryan.net/blog/2026-06-01-usenix-1999-monterey.html http://ryan.net/blog/2026-06-01-usenix-1999-monterey.html Sun, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In June 1999 I was at USENIX in Monterey. Linus Torvalds, Jordan Hubbard, Wilfredo Sanchez, Christos Zoulas, and more than twenty others at picnic tables in the afternoon sun. There is no public record of that dinner. This is mine. https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-30-hook-timing.html I had a bunch of Claude Code hooks set up to prevent bad behavior. Four out of five were wired to the wrong event — firing after Claude had already committed to a tool, not before. This also explains why I was swearing at Claude a lot last month. Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-30-hook-timing.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-30-ten-whys.html A Claude instance took 66 minutes and three user interventions to file one Jira ticket. Here is the post-mortem: five whys on the failure, then five more on the root cause of the root cause. The failure was never about wrong credentials. Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-30-ten-whys.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-23-five-whys.html Toyota developed the five whys in the 1950s. I've been using it with AI lately, and it works better than doing it alone. Here's a real example using a VPN tunnel failure that kept recurring because the real problem was never the IP. Sun, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-03-23-five-whys.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-02-14-spacex-venice.html We're visiting Venice Beach tonight, got a lucky photo of cool SpaceX trails. Fri, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-02-14-spacex-venice.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-02-11-icm.html There's a line people like to repeat about cyberpunk. William Gibson imagined cyberspace, simstim, decks, the Sprawl. He missed the cell phone, but he got the mood exactly right. The network is alive. It's hostile in a curious way. What's been interesting about running local AI lately is that it feels like play again. Tue, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-02-11-icm.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-31-killswitch.html Like many dotcom Gen-X hipsters this week, I'm playing with OpenClaw - an AI agent in a Slack channel where I'm the only member. I can reach it from my phone. It has shell access to a Linux workstation in my barn. Also terrifying. So I built otp-challenger - TOTP verification for AI agents. Fri, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-31-killswitch.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-20-stealing-fire.html I came to New York City in 1995. The dotcom explosion was happening. I was working as a sysadmin at an ISP. Here is a statistic that might terrify a modern Hiring Manager: I have never held a job where I did not have root. This is gonzo-sysops. But you learn things when you are five hops deep in a server that is currently on fire. Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-20-stealing-fire.html https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-18-desire-path.html There is a specific kind of intellectual satisfaction in building a ship in a bottle. For the last few months, this has been my reality with AI — asking Claude to SSH into jump hosts, launch tmux sessions, and type commands into shells. Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryan.net/blog/2026-01-18-desire-path.html