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Latest — 05 Oct 2026

A Consulting Shift to Buying Accountability

By Randy Armknecht For most of my career, the consulting model was easy to explain. Clients paid for experience. At the top sat a partner who had seen the problem a dozen times. Under them sat a pyramid of analysts and consultants who did the research, built the models, and

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The Memory Is the Moat

By Randy Armknecht GPT-6 Astra shipped on September 4 and I read enough to want a real run at it. Working with Claude Code since it was first released had left that side of the house knowing my projects, my preferences, and my habits. ChatGPT knew none of it.

My Memory System Almost Forgot Why It Existed

I built a memory system so I would stop paying for the same mistake twice. Most projects turn up a trap eventually, some detail that costs real time or real money once and has to survive past the moment I learned it. The problem was never capturing them in a

Evenings Are the Day Job Without the Budget

I've been reading We Are Not Machines by Sarah O'Connor, and today one page stopped me long enough to photograph it and draft this blog. We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of WorkA tsunami of change, we are told, is sweeping the econo…

Two Machines, Nine Models, One Number That Mattered

By Randy Armknecht and Mia Three things were wrong with my desktop. The Radeon RX 7900 XT's 20 GB ceiling kept newer image models out of ComfyUI. Tuesday night gaming with friends meant unloading whatever model was resident first. And the scripts that summarize articles for me before

300 Findings, 7 That Mattered

I spent part of this week looking at an open source project for orchestrating agents. Before I ran a line of it, I put it through the usual gates: semgrep, gitleaks, npm audit, and ruff with the bandit rules turned on. The tools handed back roughly 300 findings. A number

A Product in Spring, a Line Item in Summer

I never got comfortable running Claude Code sessions inside Anthropic's cloud. The prompts and the context were already going over the wire, and handing over full copies of the repository, the build artifacts, and whatever secrets a session touches felt like paying twice for the same trip. So

Nothing Broke, So Nothing Got Fixed

I removed PAI from my machine and did not think about it again. Weeks later I went looking for the Telegram assistant I had built on top of it and found the systemd unit disabled and inactive. I had not noticed it was gone. Building custom software got cheap. Noticing

If I See It, I Think About It

Summer's an odd time for spring cleaning, but that's where I've landed anyway. Newsletter subscriptions I don't open. Sources in my news-feed I skim past more out of guilt than interest. And a Claude Code status line from a project I

Reading About It Won't Build It.

My daughters do martial arts with me. We train in class together; we practice forms at home. You can read every judo textbook ever printed and watch every tutorial on YouTube. The throw will not be there. The throw develops on the mat: doing it, being thrown, repeating until your