Tools for the tools
Most of the week went into internal tools work for Semita: sixty-odd commits, nearly all in two days, making the tools more trustworthy, cheaper to run and better at talking to each other. EdiLoom reached 1.6.1 along the way, with a proper product spec sheet written at last.
Saturday was housekeeping across everything I host: every site patched for a reflected XSS in the framework underneath, and every one given CI, so nothing deploys unless the build passes first. The HUD hub's addon shipped r1.0.2 as well, so importing an Edit Mode layout no longer taints the World of Warcraft UI.
And over the weekend, away from the screen: a custom-order collar finished, dyed antique brown and set with silver hardware, with more from Week 009's blanks still on the bench.
Software
A lead engine that answers to Claude
The big one was Semita's lead-generation tool: sixty-odd commits in a week, ending with an MCP server behind proper OAuth so Claude can read the pipeline and add to it directly. Underneath that, the guard rails that make an AI drafter safe to leave running — a ledger and hard spend caps on every model call, a validator that stands between the drafter and the send queue, and a gate that refuses to email an address it only guessed at. The main Semita platform moved with it: a rework of user administration, the plumbing that lets the two share sign-in and talk to each other cleanly, and some new dashboard graphs. The EDI canonical model picked up per-level references and measurements on the way past.
On the World of Warcraft side, patch 12.1.5 landed, so every one of my addons got its interface bump and a fresh release. The fishing journal got more than that: a batch of work that had only ever lived in the game's AddOns folder, never committed anywhere, finally recovered and folded back in.
Software
Can you build on it?
LandGate went from an empty folder to a working proof of concept in a day: give it a Colorado address or parcel number and it comes back with a sourced panel on whether rural land is actually buildable — water rights, septic, flood, hazards, access, power, oil and gas wells, zoning — pulled live from the state's own sources rather than a listing's optimism.
On the Semita side, the EDI canonical model learned TRADACOMS, the British format, and now folds a multi-message file into a single document, checked against a sample of a 132,000-file corpus. The platform got detail pages for its documents and ship notices.
And some of the making happened away from a screen: a handful of blanks made for belts and collars in a spread of colors, and two hat patterns cut out and prepped to sew — waiting only on getting the machine up and running.
Software
Tablet time, and a little EDI
Mostly a week at the tablet instead of the keyboard. Pen control exercises first — the repetitive drills that nobody frames, but that decide whether every line after them comes out steady or wobbly. Then photo manipulation and a tour of the tools, for school: finding out what the software can actually do before an assignment needs it. Practice rather than pieces, and that is still making. The keyboard got a turn too: proof-of-concept work for Semita on correlating 866 schedules with the 856 ship notices that answer them.
Art
Analysis, written down
The quiet kind of week: digging into how parts of the Semita EDI platform actually behave, and writing down what I found so it outlives my memory of it. Alongside that, a few quick proofs of concept — small enough to throw away, but enough to tell whether an idea holds before anybody builds on it. Client work, so there is nothing to show, but the thinking ended up on the page instead of staying in my head.
Software
DevForge grew a form designer
The addon development toolkit went from r1.1.0 to r1.6.4 in a week: a Frame Builder that lays out forms against a live preview, API autocomplete with signature help, Lua syntax highlighting, and an editor that holds several snippets open at once. The unglamorous half counts too — a frame picker that stops crashing on protected values and stops eating the framerate, and deprecated calls swapped out across the other addons before the patch does it for me.
Software
A validation report you can send somebody
Most of the week went into moving my kid across the country, so the making got one Tuesday evening — and it was a big one. EdiLoom will now produce a full segment-and-field validation report, exported as CSV or HTML, so a trading partner gets a document instead of a shrug. It runs against per-partner profiles, and a conditional rule finally blames the field that actually broke instead of the one that triggered the check. Thirteen hundred lines, a quarter of them tests.
Software
A cleaner 830, and EdiLoom tidied
Taught the outbound 830 planning schedule to stop writing a byte-order mark at the head of the interchange — an invisible character that a trading partner's parser rejects without ever telling you why — and pinned the month's export so it stays reproducible. EdiLoom got the quieter kind of progress: the canonical derivation and persistence design written down at last, and a container for the MCP server. Housekeeping, not a headline, but it was the week's work.
Software
Sketchbook pages, and art school prep
Most of this week lived in the sketchbook rather than in a repo: a flower-crowned goblin worked up in graphite and ink, and a page of loose scribbles — a burning eye, an octopus, a robot, and a cup of the darkest roast there is. Warm-ups for art school, not portfolio pieces. They are up on hatdragon.com now, which is the part that makes them count.
See the pages↗Art
Housing for wowhuds, and dnlp back in practice
Taught the HUD hub to read housing manifests, so one paste finishes a submission instead of a form full of guesses — still on a branch, not shipped, which counts here anyway. And dnlp.net is answering again: the 2002 studio relaunched, with a contact form that keeps what it is given rather than handing it to a mail client and hoping.
Software
This site
Built the front door. The manifesto is up, the what-ifs are listed, and this log exists — which means there's now nowhere to hide.
Software