Side-Project

Two weeks ago I wrote about Idle Beekeepers and mentioned it was a spin-off of a bigger game. This is that game. Beekeepers is a calm management game about real beekeeping, built in Godot, and it’s close to the end. The field in spring: two hives, planting plots, and a banner saying what needs doing next and when. ...

I now have four things that ship releases: Codex, Codex Reader, Tsundoku and Idle Beekeepers. Their release notes were spread across GitHub releases, the App Store, and a private repository nobody else can see. So I built one page for all of them: updates.4sh.dev. One card per project with its current version, and the latest updates across all of them. ...

Codex Reader is live on the App Store today. It’s a native iPhone and iPad app for reading a Codex library: comics, manga and ebooks, from your own server, online or offline. Home, library, series, the comic reader, and reading stats. All screenshots use the app’s built-in demo library. Why build a native app at all Codex has a Komga-compatible API, so I’d been reading on iOS with Komic, a good Komga client. Codex also has its own web app, which installs as a PWA. ...

Idle Beekeepers is a slow idle game about keeping bees the way beekeepers really do. It plays in your browser and installs like an app. Year 9: forty colonies, a honey house, a workshop and a cellar. The premise You’re a burnt-out office worker. One day a parcel arrives: a second-hand beekeeping book from your aunt. No letter, just a line on the flyleaf: “You always did like a system you could watch work.” ...

This project started back in 2022, when I built air quality monitors connected to Home Assistant: small devices running on solar panels and batteries. The idea behind them was bigger than air quality. Sensors like these could watch a greenhouse and act on it, track the weather, or monitor pretty much anything you care about. What really interested me was applying that to beekeeping and farming. In 2025 I took a step in that direction, monitoring my plants over LoRa, a long-range radio, with a valve for watering. Then both projects sat there. ...

In May I wrote Codex, Three Months In. Codex had just replaced Komga on my server, and the big new thing was release tracking. Since then: a 2.0 release, a new way of tracking reading progress, support for running several instances, and a native iOS client that’s almost ready for the App Store. Here’s what mattered. Reading progress that doesn’t go backwards The most important change is one you’d never see in a screenshot. ...

The sdd plugin is about what gets built and how it’s verified. Its sibling, delegation, is about who does the work. It started as a few subagent definitions and some notes on model tiering, and grew into a plugin that can also send work outside the Claude account I’m sitting in. Matching the model to the work The core of the plugin is a set of agents, each tied to a model tier that fits the kind of work it does: ...

Since I introduced Tsundoku in June, most of what changed is small, but one thing is worth a post: Tsundoku and Codex now talk to each other in both directions. Codex and Tsundoku, both ways In June the integration went one way. Tsundoku read Codex’s series index (read-only, with an API key) so it could mark which series I already own and focus on the ones I don’t. Now it goes the other way too. ...

Almost every project I’ve written about this year, Codex, Tsundoku, Kiln, Mnemo, was built the same way: a PRD, broken into phase specs, broken into task files, implemented one task at a time with Claude Code doing most of the typing. That workflow started as a handful of personal slash commands, and it’s now a proper Claude Code plugin called sdd. This post is about what it does, and about the part that took the most work: making it enforce itself. ...

Every project I’ve written about this year produced the same kind of leftover: decisions. Why Tsundoku identifies series the way it does. Why Codex plugins talk over stdio. Why the third attempt at a library server used SQLite. Each took an evening of thinking, and each lived in exactly one place: whatever chat window I had open at the time. That’s the problem Mnemo solves. The line at the top of its PRD is: context is the most valuable thing you produce, and it currently lives nowhere. It’s spread across chat projects that don’t talk to each other, markdown files I forget I wrote, and notes apps that no agent can reach. ...