brycewatson.com / log / 2026-06-22
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interactive claude sessions / day peak 9

34 sessions · peak 9/day

What I worked on this week.

  • shipped: built, merged, verified
  • in progress
see the same work by goal

Project: brycewatson.com

2 sessions this week · active 3/7 days

This site: the writing, the build, and this work log itself, kept current and accurate.

this weekSwitched the work log to the open-source honestweek engine, enforced the published goal lens against the operator's registry, and surfaced week-to-week goal changes.

archive
shipped jun 27

Enforced the published goal lens against the operator's authoritative registry

The goals page publishes a curated subset of the operator's objectives, and nothing guaranteed the published lens and the registry stayed in step. I made the build fetch the operator's authoritative registry and fail loudly if the published lens carries an unsanctioned goal or a drifted label, group, or mapping, with a self-explaining preflight when the access secret is missing. The gate is live in production.

goal Ship an auto-updating weekly work log as honest proof of recent work
shipped jun 26

Switched this site's work log to be generated by the honestweek engine

The weekly work log had been produced by a site-specific script. I moved it onto honestweek, the standalone open-source engine, so the page is now generated by the same tool anyone can run, with every cited commit verified and every number re-derived from git. The committed page is what the engine produces, and the credit on the page is now literally true.

goal Ship an auto-updating weekly work log as honest proof of recent work
shipped jun 26

Published a post on Claude Code's silent session-log deletion

Wrote and shipped a post on a quiet default in Claude Code: session logs are deleted after a month unless you change a setting, which can erase history you rely on. The post documents the gotcha, the setting that controls it, and how to check your own, verified against the official docs before publishing.

goal Ship the next most valuable blog post each week, fact-checked
in progress jun 22

Migrated the Weekly Work Log to a judgment-assisted, Claude-scheduled flow

Moved the weekly build off the fragile Windows scheduled task onto a Claude scheduled task that catches up on next launch, added opt-in multi-week backfill, and gave the unattended run fail-open advisory judgment plus the ability to curate every session. The deterministic honesty guarantees stay the real backstop.

goal Ship an auto-updating weekly work log as honest proof of recent work
shipped jun 22

Surfaced week-to-week goal changes on the goals page

The goals page showed where each goal stood but not how the goal set itself was shifting. I added a per-goal activity strip and a change log that records when a goal is added, split, retired, or relabeled, drawing the structural changes from a curated source of truth so the page can show how the goals move over time. Shipped to production.

goal Ship an auto-updating weekly work log as honest proof of recent work

Project: honestweek

9 sessions this week · active 4/7 days

An open-source tool that generates an honest weekly work log: it re-derives every number from real git and aborts the build rather than publish an unverified claim, and redacts private detail by rule. It is the engine that now generates this page.

this weekBuilt it from scratch to a working first version, then added the site mode that generates this very report.

archive
shipped jun 26

Added a standalone interactive page mode to honestweek

Added a self-contained, interactive HTML report mode with an opt-in goals page, so honestweek can render a standalone report without integrating into a target site.

shipped jun 25

Added a site mode that generates a verified report into a target site's data artifact

Added the output mode that integrates a verified report into an existing site's data files, which is how honestweek now produces this very work log. The engine re-derives every number and the target site's own redactor scrubs the result, so the page cannot carry a number that was not verified against real git.

shipped jun 23

Built honestweek, an open-source engine for an honest weekly work log

Stood up honestweek's honesty core: a git verify-or-abort engine that re-derives every cited commit from real git at build time and aborts rather than publish a claim it cannot verify. honestweek is the open-source, MIT-licensed tool that grew out of this from-scratch build and now generates this page.

Project: chat-arch

1 entry this week

Tooling that mines my Claude chat history for patterns, now winding down into an archive.

jun 26

Picked up the last chat-arch work before winding it down to an archive

Ran a session in chat-arch to handle the remaining work before the project winds down into an archive.

Project: Command

12 sessions this week · active 5/7 days

Watches all ~65 of my projects and keeps their Claude Code setups optimized and running cleanly: surfacing CI failures, stale or unpushed work, and config drift, and proposing the fix from one seat.

this weekHardened the backend in a verified program across reliability, security, and performance, and root-caused its runaway memory growth as an auth outage rather than the cache it looked like.

archive
jun 25

Verified Claude Code's log-retention setting holds, then handed off a post on the default

Checked whether a change to keep chat logs far longer than the default was actually taking effect on disk, not just set in config, and confirmed it against the official docs. Because the default deletion trips up anyone who relies on their logs, the operator handed the finding to this site as a fully-specified brief for a short post rather than writing it in place.

goal Make my operator's behavior reliably evolvable through skills and durable rules
shipped jun 24

Audited the operator's goal definitions and added research-first discipline to the delegation skill

Audited the operator's standing goals for drift, finding the set mostly sound with staleness the main gap, then folded the result into the delegation skill: before handing work to a project, do enough research to file it at the right level of detail. The skill change shipped with its review trail.

goal Make my operator's behavior reliably evolvable through skills and durable rules
shipped jun 23

Root-caused the backend's runaway memory growth as an auth outage, not the cache

The backend's memory bloat looked like a caching problem. Measured against the running process, the real cause was an expired authentication token: every automated narrative regeneration had been failing for days, and each failed retry still left a junk session file behind, piling up into a flood that ate the memory. I shipped a circuit breaker to stop the retry storm, a cleanup, and a startup loader so the credential can be provisioned without a code change, then verified the memory dropped and the narrative layer came back online. The earlier cache and change-gate diagnoses were both disproven live and retracted.

goal Keep a live status picture across all my projects
shipped jun 22

Hardened the operator's backend across reliability, security, and performance

A deep dive into the operator's backend turned into a verified hardening program run in batches. The headline fix closed a class of bug where a transient file-hold during a poll could read a store as empty and overwrite it; alongside it came trust-boundary and gate-internal security work, a spending wall, containment and prompt-injection guards, and poll-loop performance work. Each batch was implemented test-first and carried its own reviewed, commit-pinned verdict before merging.

goal Build an always-aware autonomous operator that runs my standing goals with minimal hand-holding
shipped jun 22

Split the demand-engine goal into its real stages in the operator's registry

The public goals page lumped all of the demand-engine work under a single vague goal. I split it in the operator's registry into the distinct stages the engine actually moves through and published its first live vertical by name, minting the new objectives through the same validated path the operator uses rather than editing the store by hand. The split now drives the goals page.

goal Build an always-aware autonomous operator that runs my standing goals with minimal hand-holding
jun 22

Traced unexpected image-API spend to a shared key, not the project blamed for it

An image-generation API looked like it was being run up by a dormant project. Tracing the actual usage showed the project had been idle for months and was not the source; the real pattern was a shared key copied across several projects, so spend from the active image tools all landed on it and looked like it came from the quiet project. The suspected project was cleared and the shared-key risk surfaced.

goal Keep a live status picture across all my projects

Project: claude-global-skills

1 session this week · active 1/7 days

My machine-wide Claude tooling, version-controlled behind a privacy guard so the automation that touches every project stays clean and auditable.

this weekBuilt a ship-it skill from the most-used build prompt and back-ported the portability wins from the public mirror into the live runtime.

archive
shipped jun 25

Built a ship-it skill from the build prompt used across the most projects

The same long build instruction kept getting retyped from memory to drive a goal from research through plan, implementation, testing, a pull request, and review. I mined how it was actually used across many projects, then designed, drafted, and adversarially reviewed a global skill that runs an upgraded version of it, so the discipline is captured once and available everywhere instead of held in my head.

goal Maintain and grow an open-source library of Claude skills and hooks
jun 23

Audited the live skills against the public mirror and back-ported the portability wins

Checked every live skill against the public, de-personalized mirror to see what had drifted, and confirmed the capture this audit was meant to do had already merged. Where the public repo was genuinely more portable, I back-ported those fixes into the live runtime, keeping the de-personalization out so my real working context stayed intact. The audit itself was read-only.

goal Maintain and grow an open-source library of Claude skills and hooks

Project: DemandForge

3 sessions this week · active 2/7 days

A category-authority research engine: it earns trust by producing original, sourced research for a product category, then points that trust at products. The machine does the labor; I approve in about fifteen minutes a day.

this weekRan the live vertical's distribution to a fair verdict, refreshing the dataset, re-verifying the pricing claims, and sending the first outreach wave.

archive
shipped jun 23

Ran the live vertical's distribution to a fair verdict and sent the first outreach wave

Took a requirements issue end to end so the vertical's upcoming keep-or-kill decision would be a fair test rather than a verdict on work never done. I refreshed the dataset, re-verified the load-bearing pricing claims against their primary sources, added the measurement and ledger machinery to capture what works, and put the outreach emails through a quality pass in both my voice and the recipient's before the first wave went out. A claim that prices had risen turned out to be a transient sale and was caught and pulled before it could become a hook.

goal Launch and grow PlumageDispatch, the engine's first live vertical
in progress jun 22

Diagnosed whether the demand engine was living up to its potential

Worked through a worry that the project was underusing its real potential. The honest read was half-right: the reusable engine that holds the upside was sitting frozen as design docs while all the effort went into a single hand-built vertical, but building the engine now would be premature. The call that came out of it was to prove the live vertical first, fix the slow and clumsy parts of running it, and generalize the engine only after a win.

goal Turn the demand engine into revenue

Project: Akaya

2 sessions this week · active 1/7 days

An AI platform. My work here makes its question-answering measurable and trustworthy: golden datasets and a real evaluation harness instead of guesswork.

this weekBuilt the eval baseline and golden sets, closed a retrieval gap, and packaged the phase to share.

in progress jun 22

Investigated a flagged dashboard issue on the question-answering platform

Looked into an issue raised against the platform's dashboard and established the facts before acting: the referenced item was already merged and long since superseded by a later rebuild, so the right move was to confirm that rather than redo finished work.

in progress jun 22

Checked branch and pull-request status on the platform and corrected a stale read

Reviewed the current branch and open pull request on the platform, then caught that the first read was based on stale cached state and re-checked against the live remote, which had in fact moved. The corrected picture showed the local branch was behind, not ahead.

next up watch the outreach replies on the live vertical, and let honestweek run this site's weekly log on its own.