Stack — a field guide to one person's computingwork in progress ·

How I use
computers.

~30 NixOS, nix-darwin, nix-on-droid and NixOS-WSL machines in one flake, some twenty-five Android apps, and a swarm of agents that has made tens of thousands of commits. It's built in the open and reviewed from a phone.

Start here The whole thing in one arc, and the loud short version.

Frame from The stack, composed
film · new · composed · narrated · v0.2 · 6 minutes · sketch

The stack, composed

The long film, rebuilt around one arc instead of a list: tools arriving and connecting many to many, two tools on one event, a tool on a blackboard, Cacophony's architecture, Collective's language and fleet, every tool behind one protocol, what it made, and the agents making the next tool. 25 scenes taken from seven films, each keeping its look and music, with match cuts carrying a shared name across the seams. Now narrated, in the stack's own voice (its TTS), with subtitles in the player.

watch & annotate →

also: three-minute version, composed from the same view at a lower detail

Frame from the trailer: the real caco TUI drawn with kitty graphics
film · v2.2 · 107 seconds · 3D

The stack in a minute

The fast version, and the loudest: 103 commands, the terminal graphics engine, every surface on a 3D carousel, a screenshot that assembles from 16,000 particles, a 3D calendar of this year's 5,187 PRs, the swarm, a music section and a live wall of the film's own scenes. Real WebGL, rendered frame by frame.

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Music videos Fast cuts and flashing imagery.

Frame from the music video: a capture of the stack pushed through a kaleidoscope shader in neon, a tool name slammed across it
House · 128 bpm · v0.6 · 116 seconds · sketch

The stack, music video

Neon kaleidoscopes, torn colour channels and liquid screens, with live terminal sessions running through them. The hook is the stack’s own voice, chopped into the beat, and every word on screen lands as it’s sung.

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Frame from The fleet at 174: a Cacophony capture shattered into glowing shards, graded ice blue, a fleet figure across it
Drum and bass · 174 bpm · v0.6 · 77 seconds · sketch

The fleet at 174

Two-step breaks, ghost snares and a breathing Reese bass. Cacophony’s screens, moving, become ASCII, shards and tunnels; ice turns to fire after the halftime break. The words land on the sung chops.

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Frame from One flake: a striped synthwave sun over a neon grid, a terminal capture riding the grid toward the camera, chrome words
Synthwave · 104 bpm · v0.7 · 92 seconds · sketch

One flake, synthwave

Gated snares, an octave bass and a delayed arpeggio. Terminal captures ride a neon grid beneath a striped sun, with Collective’s numbers in chrome.

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Frame from Night shift: a terminal session seen through rain on glass, dusk colours, a quiet lowercase caption
Lo-fi · 82 bpm · v0.1 · 82 seconds · sketch

Night shift

The calm one. A swung boom-bap beat, jazz chords on electric piano, vinyl crackle. The fleet’s real sessions run behind rain on glass in dusk colours, with quiet captions: 18 nodes live, 30 crons, 29 beads closed in a day.

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Deep dives Two systems, in depth: what they are made of and how they work.

Frame from the Collective film: a Nix syntax tree drawn in ink on paper
film · new · narrated · v0.14 · 6:42 · sketch

Collective, by hand

Our own language over all of Nix, mostly by hand, and what it makes: Nix parsing itself, types in Nix, functions that take any number of arguments, a keyboard language built on them that compiles to the phone's keyboard and ten variants, one flake for ~30 machines, 676 options, the one line that turns an agent stack on, one palette fanned out to every program, agents wrapped in layers, how a new agent tool arrives, a command line written as data, every machine answering a switch, and the cache that builds the fleet first.

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Standalone keyboard-language demo · 30 seconds · MP4

Frame from the Cacophony film: a spec-sheet panel of caco commands with one key lit
film · new · narrated · v0.11 · 3:45 · sketch

Cacophony, how it works

The architecture, drawn as it runs: a daemon on every node and the mesh, a bead becoming ready and claimed by exactly one agent, an agent's lifecycle, work landing in two places, a real typed flow graph running, messages that persist while waking is a choice, every app driven through its own command server, the daemon compiled into the phone, the graphics hillclimb measured against its controls, a command tree that writes its own MCP tools, and six months of it counted.

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Standalone flow-graph demo · 17 seconds · MP4

One tool each Single-tool films, each in its own look, built from real runs and real screens.

Frame from the omni film: one command travelling three glowing cables to Android, a desktop and a relay
film · new · a tool · narrated · v0.1 · 92 seconds · sketch

omni, every keystroke

A patch bay: one command runs three cables, to an Android keyboard, a desktop daemon and a relay for phones and watches. Every key as the exact intent Android receives, two subscribers to one event, a macro file replayed line by line, and physical keys joining the bus. All real output.

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Standalone routing demo · 21 seconds · MP4

Frame from the nlir film: a sentence fanned through five operators, chalked on a blackboard
film · new · a tool · narrated · v0.2 · 84 seconds · sketch

nlir, on a blackboard

The first single-tool film. A terse shorthand that compiles to English: 31 operators chalked up (the yellow ones are done by a model), a map and fold worked line by line, one sentence through five operators, and two operators composing. Every result is a real run.

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Standalone fan-out demo · 24 seconds · MP4

Frame from the Culture film: the same agent session on a Mac, the web, phones, tablets and a watch
film · new · a tool · narrated · v0.2 · 98 seconds · sketch

Culture, on every screen

One agent, every screen: the same live session on the Mac, the web, Android, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, held in their device frames on a 3D shelf while a camera travels between them. Replying from your wrist, approving a tool from your phone, panes inside panes. Every screen is a real capture.

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Composed and experiments Films built from the other films' scenes, and the zoom.

Frame from Many to many: two dozen tools on a ring, every pair connected
film · new · composed · v0.1 · 2:09 · sketch

Many to many

The arc of the whole thing: tools arriving one at a time and each connecting to every tool before it (the pairs grow quadratically, the chains faster), then every tool behind one protocol, chains becoming programs, reaching every machine, and agents making the next tool. The first film composed from the other films' scenes, each keeping its own look and music.

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also: one-minute version, composed from the same view at a lower detail

Frame from Six looks: scenes from every film, one after another
film · new · composed · v0.1 · 87 seconds · sketch

Six looks

One moment from every film's look, back to back, each entering with its own signature move and keeping its own music: the phosphor tape, the broadcast, the zoom's glass, ink on paper, the spec sheet and the blackboard. Proof that any scene can now be composed into any film.

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Frame from the Zoom film: a terminal inside a tilted portal, the scale readout in the corner
film · new · v0.12 · 91 seconds · sketch

Zoom

Powers of Ten for the stack: from a cursor in vim out through Pi, its tools, the daemon, Paratenic, Culture, the fleet and Cacophony, to the person, and back to the cursor. Every level is a real recording.

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The first long films Where it started: nine months in three acts, and the whole stack on one tape.

Frame from the nine-months film: a chart of commits per month rising sharply from March 2026
film · v0.58

Nine months since Opus 4.5

Nine months of building with agents: what Cacophony, pi-daemon, Caravan and Paratenic are and how they work, the same setup on every screen, and music in 5/4, 7/8 and 11/8.

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or download the latest render (v0.58 mp4) · scene index of all three films · new in round 6: 3D and shaders

Frame from the Everything film: a phosphor-green index of every piece in the stack
film · v0.65 · crt tape

Everything

The whole stack on one VHS tape: a channel for each layer and a tape for each piece. Each tape covers what the piece does, how it flows and why it exists. Built straight from the atlas.

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Reference

31 pieces · 7 layers
atlas · what & why

Every piece, and why

Each tool in plain language: what it does for you, how it works as one small diagram, what it connects to, and where to start.

read →
Culture web with a second agent pinned beside the first
site · nine chapters

How I use computers

The 2021 blog idea, finally written: the machines, hands, coding on the phone, coworkers, eyes closed, seeing, play, ideas that became things, and the numbers.

read →
30 slides · presenter view
deck · colleagues

Cacophony

Project-first swarm management for coding agents: architecture, beads, an agent's life, profiles, Caravan, runtimes, Paratenic, surfaces, config, numbers and lessons. Arrow keys or swipe; n for speaker notes, p to print.

present →

Reviewing

  1. Tap ✎ (bottom right, or annotate in the player), then tap the thing that should change.
  2. Write a note and pick what kind it is (copy, timing, visual, motion, music, idea or bug).
  3. Notes → Send to GitHub files every queued note as one issue with exact times and pins. The agent reads it, fixes the problem, and closes the issue with the commit.