Answer pending

There’s a projects section on this site now. Six teardowns of things I’ve built: a Kubernetes cluster in my house, a Warframe mastery tracker, a trip-planning map, and three more that are still wearing the “answer pending” label because I haven’t got to them yet.

The last thing I published here was in 2021. Five years. In fairness I haven’t been idle in that time - the building was never the problem. Sitting down to explain the building was.

So I stopped trying to. I got an LLM to interview me instead.

The robot asks, I answer

The format is exactly what it sounds like. Claude reads the repo - the code, the commit history, the parts I’d rather it skipped - and writes the questions. I write the answers. That’s the whole trick.

It works because a good question is a bit rude. Some real ones it came back with:

Why full Kubernetes at home instead of a VPS and docker-compose like a normal person? Defend the control plane.

You run Playwright visual regression on a UI that’s supposed to look wrong. Explain yourself.

Authentik, Traefik, Prometheus - an enterprise platform stack for a household of two people and a cat. Where’s the line between practice for the day job and cosplay?

Nobody was ever going to read a description of my Helm charts, and left to my own devices a description is precisely what I’d have written. A question that starts “defend” or “explain yourself” doesn’t leave that option open. It has also already made the call about what’s interesting, which was the decision I’d been stuck on for five years.

The division of labour matters, mind. The robot writes the questions; every word of every answer is mine, typos included. I’ve no interest in publishing prose I didn’t write. I’ve a great deal of interest in never facing a blank page again.

Now I think about it, it’s the same phenomenon as why correcting someone on the internet is so addictive: when the robot gives me a spicy take, I’m more inclined to tell it why it’s so wrong, rather than make and defend the position in the same breath.

The pages wear the project’s clothes

The other thing worth mentioning is that each teardown dresses as the thing it’s about.

• TENNO.DAT is a Warframe tracker built to look like a fansite from 1999, so its interview happens inside KIM OS window chrome.
• trips is a map, so its questions are printed on paper.
• FATHOM.EXE is a wireframe pirate game, and its zone is drawn in wireframe.

This is mostly because it’s my website and nobody can stop me.

Three of the six are live. The other three are sitting there with their questions written and nothing underneath them, which makes this post either a roadmap or a fairly public accountability device. Go and have a look - the homelab one includes the weekend I lost to Spanish football law.

Honestly, giving how much I’m tinkering in this era of LLM-assisted development now, that may well end up becoming the backbone of this site.