max ronner

Blog

What I built, what broke, what it cost.

  1. The pivot fixed the product, not the customer

    In July I deleted 66,000 lines and turned JobFilter into a public-job corpus API for agents. In September I scaled the service to zero. The pivot fixed what I was building; it never fixed who it was for.

  2. The DR drill rebuilt the platform in under an hour — and found the root CA key was already gone

    A DR drill measured the platform rebuild and found the one backup it couldn't reach was already gone.

  3. CRT Shell: a desktop shell that ships as a flake, not dotfiles

    CRT Shell is live on Codeberg — a Quickshell desktop shell packaged as an installable Nix flake with a documented host contract. The wallpaper is the canvas, the consumer owns the machine-specific parts, and an off-center dog paw was the real test of that seam.

  4. dream-memory: an agent's memory, consolidated while it sleeps

    dream-memory is live on Codeberg — a CLI and MCP server that reads a git-versioned markdown memory archive. A nightly ingest folds session logs and observations into the store while the agent sleeps; this tool reads that back, bounded and read-only.

  5. huemill: a theme pipeline that won't write bad contrast to disk

    huemill is live on Codeberg — a CLI that mills a Base16 theme or the current wallpaper into one semantic desktop palette. `palette.json` is the seam: contrast is enforced in one place and every adapter inherits it.

  6. The cheapest listed price is the wrong price

    My model router left the laptop for a single-replica StatefulSet with a postgres sidecar. The migration was the easy part: routing on effective cost was the lesson.

  7. rentfree.site is live: static hosting where ownership is a key

    rentfree.site is live — single-tenant static hosting where possession of an SSH key is ownership. git push over SSH is the whole deploy path, no account sits behind a Site, and losing the key orphans the Site for good.

  8. The cheap tier carries the load (if you close the loop)

    Two billion tokens in thirty days for $16.64 — 98% of them on the cheap model. The cheap tier carries the load when the verification loop lives outside the model.

  9. Why I built embeddings for a graph I already trusted

    The vault already had 1,888 curated links and a creation gate that demanded them. I still added a semantic index — because links and keyword search both require you to already know the words, and the whole point of a second brain is that you don't.

  10. The stumble is the calibration

    JobFilter started as a hosted career platform — CV parsing, matching, cover letters, Stripe billing, the whole product. Four months later we deleted 66,000 lines of it and became a public-job corpus API for agents. The pivot isn't the story; the decision tree is.

  11. Treating AI agents like NixOS modules

    Agent permissions are usually a runtime discipline — dialogs, approvals, vigilance. I made mine a build-time proof instead.

  12. Graphs should provide context, not take over the screen

    graffa is a terminal interface for exploring the graph inside a Markdown vault — no leaving the terminal, no GUI app, no account.

  13. Terminal-first thinking — why I look up the bus from the shell

    I built a CLI for the bus schedule because I didn't want to leave the terminal. The code is trivial. The habit shift is the point.

  14. Running goose serve where my laptop can't kill it

    Goose's ACP protocol lets the agent runtime live on a k3s server while the CLI stays a thin remote — no more lost sessions, and you can run different servers for different jobs.

  15. A Nix build server, twenty lines of config

    Offloading Nix builds to a homelab server using Nix's built-in SSH-ng remote builder — no CI runner, no daemon, just SSH and a module.

  16. Hello, World

    First post on the Ronner Development blog.