Building

Clauding with Jenn.

I build things with Claude and Codex. Some of them work. The ones that do, I write down here.

Entries

20 posts

GUIDE39 chapters · evolving in public

The Agentic Builder's Guide

How I got good with Claude, what transfers to Codex, and the operating system I'm building around both.

PATTERNApr 2026

If a Number Is on the Page, It Needs a Source

My portfolio and work pages had believable but conflicting project counts. The fix was to stop treating metrics like copy and start treating them like derived data with generators, shared imports, and an audit surface.

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CASE STUDYApr 2026

Jenn OS v1: A Local Operating Layer for Work

The public architecture thread now resolves into a concrete product direction. Jenn OS should start as a local operating layer: one narrow loop, explicit records, package-first wrappers, and a UI that compiles from memory instead of pretending to be memory.

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PATTERNMar 2026

Compacting a Site Without CSS Zoom

Some pages were only comfortable when I zoomed my browser out. The right fix was not literal zoom. It was a shared shell that made app-like pages calmer, denser, and less shouty on desktop while leaving editorial pages alone.

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PATTERNMar 2026

A Working Protocol for Claude and Codex

The problem was not that Claude and Codex were both useful. The problem was that they could not learn from each other. The fix was a simple protocol for shared memory, canonical files, and promotion of lessons into reusable rules.

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TOOLFeb 2026

Cross-Model Interlocutor

I got tired of catching my own blind spots. So I built a tool that lets Claude ask ChatGPT to poke holes in its work.

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PATTERNFeb 2026

Skills as Loadable Context

My first real AI project bombed because I delivered percentages instead of recommendations. Now I write down what went wrong and load it into every future build.

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PATTERNFeb 2026

The CLAUDE.md Hierarchy

I run two Next.js sites with completely different color palettes. Early on, Claude kept painting my personal site in corporate blue. The fix was embarrassingly simple.

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TOOLFeb 2026

Plaud Multi-Note Sync

I record everything — meetings, therapy sessions, the stuff I think about on walks. Plaud’s default export missed half the notes, so I wrote my own sync.

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PATTERNFeb 2026

Making AI Sound Like Me

I fed Claude my journal entries, my Plaud transcripts, the way I actually talk. Then I told it what never to write. The second part matters more.

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PATTERNFeb 2026

Validating AI Output

Claude produces confident, clean output. That's the problem. You can't tell by looking whether it's right. I built a validation methodology that catches errors before they ship.

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TOOLJan–Feb 2026

Tools That Solve One Problem Well

I keep building small, focused tools instead of big platforms. A color contrast checker. A financial model generator. A prompt library. Each one does one thing and actually gets used.

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CASE STUDYFeb 2026

Tariff Exposure — Full System Test

I loaded all four skills, pulled live tariff data, invented a skeptical CFO, and had ChatGPT tear the whole thing apart. The counterfactual is the proof.

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PATTERNMar 2026

Enforcement Over Knowledge

78% of the bugs Claude shipped had rules that should have caught them. The problem was never that the agent didn’t know — it’s that nothing forced it to check.

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TOOLMar 2026

Six Data Explorers from Scratch

FTI economists were spending hours navigating BLS and Census websites to pull public data for background research. I built six single-file tools that do the same thing in seconds.

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TOOLMar 2026

Trial-Ready Excel from Code

Consulting deliverables end up in Excel. The quality bar for expert testimony is "would this survive cross-examination?" So I built a Python engine that generates investment-bank quality workbooks.

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CASE STUDYMar 2026

The Sync Bug That Looked Fine

My health dashboard showed stale data for weeks. It looked fine — numbers were there, charts rendered. The bug was invisible because the data was real data. Just the wrong real data.

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CASE STUDYFeb 2026

The CSS Bug in 51 Files

A single CSS shorthand rule in globals.css silently broke spacing across 51 files. Tailwind’s `pt-12` was being overridden by `padding: 0 1.5rem` — and it took a full site audit to find it.

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PATTERNMar 2026

When Auto-Commits Obscure History

I had an auto-commit hook that committed after every Claude Code session. 122 commits later, git log was useless — every message said "auto-sync session data."

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PATTERNApr 2026

Tag It, Badge It, Block the Export

Six standalone data explorers shipped with embedded reference data that could be exported straight into client deliverables. The fix was a three-part system: tag every data point with its source at ingest, show provenance badges in the UI, and block exports until the data is verified.

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