Writing
Notes from building the projects, and the occasional piece on running technology organisations at scale.
- 20 September 2026Hermetic7 min read
Hermetic in September: catalogs, a desktop app, and a server for your agent
Point Hermetic at a data catalog and it becomes one source with many tables. It is now a signed desktop app that runs analysis without Docker, and an MCP server any agent can use as its analysis room.
- 9 August 2026Hermetic15 min read
Hermetic since June: every number in the report traces to a line of code
Since June I rebuilt Hermetic so a language model never types a number. The model picks which claims to make. Tested code computes the values, renders the units, and attaches the data checks.
- 28 June 2026Hermetic9 min read
Hermetic in June: clicking into answers, querying warehouses, and trusting the numbers
You can click into a dashboard now. It works on real data warehouses, for roughly 28 cents a run. And most of the month went on reliability and trust, because the first two only matter if you can believe the result.
- 3 June 20264 min read
I directed. I didn’t type.
Three side projects, six months, zero lines of code in my own hand. The surprise was not how much AI could build. It was what being able to build anything did to me.
- 31 May 2026Hermetic7 min read
Hermetic: closing the agentic loop
Investigate now runs as an actual agentic loop, not a parallelized batch executor. Between each wave of sub-questions, a re-planner inspects the results and can amend the plan or stop early.
- 13 May 2026Hermetic6 min read
Hermetic: from query box to agentic analysis
Hermetic could answer a question, but it couldn’t have a conversation. That loop, ask, learn, follow up, come back later, is what the last few weeks focused on. Plus a multi-step Investigate agent, Snowflake and Databricks, and scheduled runs.
- 7 April 2026Hermetic4 min read
Hermetic update #3: from single questions to actual conversations with your data
Hermetic now supports conversational follow-ups, persistent history with re-run against fresh data, local Parquet and DuckDB file analysis, and a lot of reliability work across all 31 chart types.
- 28 March 2026Hermetic5 min read
Hermetic got a lot better - here’s what changed and why
The open-source tool that lets you analyze data without exposing it to LLMs got a significant update. New UI, warehouse connections, smart question suggestions, and a bunch of things I should have done the first time around.
- 9 March 2026Hermetic4 min read
Hermetic: an experiment in private data analysis with LLMs & Generative UI
LLMs don’t need to see raw data to write correct analysis code. They only need the schema. If that’s true, then data never needs to leave the user’s machine.
- 31 January 2026Behind Every Them5 min read
Behind Every “Them” Is a Poem You Haven’t Heard
Every culture has poems that function like passwords. If I want you to understand who “they” actually are, I need to show you what they carry in their heads. So I built a poetry layer.
- 11 January 2026The Front Page4 min read
Announcing The Front Page
A simple, free, global news site that shows you the top headlines from 60+ countries, every day, from credible sources worldwide. No algorithm. Breaking out of the echo chamber, one headline at a time.
- 1 January 2026Behind Every Them2 min read
The Abstraction Problem
Propaganda doesn’t work by making you cruel. It works by keeping people abstract. The cure for abstraction isn’t argument. It’s encounter. So over the holidays, I built BehindEveryThem.com.
