More coding than writing these days

Welcome to my public journal #61, where I share some of the things that are on my mind.

Coding Projects

• Word-A-Day: I built and launched a vocabulary game called Word-A-Day. Every day a new word drops. Players come to the app to learn the word. If they choose to accept the challenge, they have until the end of the day to use the word in a post on social media. After each day ends, their submission gets scored by an AI for correctness (did you demonstrate word mastery?), authenticity (do you sound human?) and originality (independent thought). Players build streaks and can climb the daily, weekly and global leaderboards. It’s currently only available to play on Farcaster, but will be coming soon to other platforms. If you want to learn more, you can read my launch announcement, or check out the website where you can also get on the waitlist.

• Warpee.eth AI Bot: The first real project I worked on when I got back into coding was an AI bot with access to all the video content in the GM Farcaster library. We had been livestreaming for years and built up a huge knowledge base of Farcaster history but since video isn’t inherently searchable like text, there was no way for people to interact with all that content. Agents had not yet taken off when I first designed the bot using a basic RAG system, so as much as the bot could answer some questions, it wasn’t reliable or consistent. I finally got around to upgrading Warpee’s basic framework from workflow-router/RAG to agentic workflow with skills. Warpee now has a handful of skills, so now when someone tags him and asks him a question, he decides which ones to use. This framework is much easier to build on top of because when I want to give him more capabilities, I can just add more skills to his library.

• x402 Experiment: If you believe agents will be doing more and more activity on behalf of humans, and if you believe that APIs will be how agents communicate and transact with each other, then it follows that agents need a native way to exchange value (aka pay for things). Enter the world of x402 and more recently MPP. These are protocols that wrap APIs behind crypto payment methods and only process the API request after payment is sent. I really wanted to test this concept out so I built a simple prototype and tested it to see it work.

• Paid Down Tech Debt: Thanks to a scary breach at Vercel a few weeks ago and two recent high profile supply chain attacks, I decided to spend time hardening up some of my code repositories and coding practices. I wasn’t impacted by any of the recent attacks but it was a good wake up call.

  • Rotated all secrets and keys across all projects (took 3 days - probably because it’s one thing Caude can’t do it on its own!). Also cleaned up unused env vars and documented the process so it will be easier in the future.

  • Migrated transcript embeddings to a new index with larger and overlapping chunks and newer embedding model. Pointed all consumers to new index. The plan was to sunset the old one, but search results are not actually better, likely because larger chunk size means less precision, especially for keyword searches.

  • Migrated the lore database from a JSON file in S3 to Postgres SQL on Neon. Pointed all consumers to new database and sunset the S3 files.

  • Migrated the lore scraping job to my admin dashboard in the cloud so I don’t have to run it locally on my PC anymore.

  • Consolidated the gmfarcaster superfan snap into the gmfc monorepo so all gm-farcaster projects are together.

  • Refactored the gmfarcaster website to make the episode detail pages fully crawlable by search engines and bots. Previously the transcripts were generated client side so it wasn’t being indexed.

Reflections

• I started using Claude in the terminal and have given it more and more control over decisions. When Claude code first came out and everyone said they were using -dangerously-skip-permissions , I was still reviewing everything Claude was outputting. As I had time to get comfortable I started reviewing less and less code and I’m pretty much at the point where I’m not looking at the code at all. It’s still extremely important to understand your risk profile, blast impact, technical architecture, etc. while building, and if I had a database with PII or was collecting payments that would be different than protecting a database with a list of vocabulary words and podcast transcripts.

• Micro payments were cool to experiment with. No one actually used the prototype I built (the wallet has exactly $0.001 in it which was the payment I sent for my test) and I’ve since taken it down. Does that mean it’s not worth experimenting with? Of course not; it’s cool to get hands-on experience with emerging patterns. When the time comes for me to have an idea that a bot would want to buy, I’ll be ready to go.

Other Projects

• Clanker Ecosystem Fund was announced. The fund’s mission is to distribute protocol fees to creators and communities who positively contribute to the Clanker and Farcaster ecosystem. It was also announced that GM Farcaster will be acting as the stewards of the fund. There has been a lot of discussion about grant distribution and how fees are best distributed to a community - from pure KPI and algorithm based to opinionated, human directed decisions. There are also lots of questions about who is eligible to receive grants. As we’re just getting started, a lot of these questions will be made clear over time, but the one thing I keep telling people is we will always stay true to the mission of rewarding people who are positively impacting Farcaster/Clanker. Prof and I have been daily users of Farcaster for almost 4 years and have been documenting and highlighting all the incredible builders and we’re both very excited to be acting as stewards of the fund.

• Bat, A Friend to All is coming soon! The children’s book I started with my sister over three years ago is closer than ever to being ready for publishing. She finished all the art (check out the website for previews) and now we’re working with a graphic designer to prepare the final manuscript file for uploading to self-publishing platforms. I’ve continued my research into the world of self-publishing and for our book we’ll likely do a combination of:

  • IngramSpark for distribution through bookstores and libraries

  • Amazon KDP for distribution through Amazon

  • Direct Sales for distributing autographed copies through our website

  • If anyone is interested in the economics, estimated earnings per book for a 24 page children’s book with a list price of $24.99 is: $1.50 thru book stores, $6.00 on amazon, and $15 direct sale

Some of the (other) things

Roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across:

• On the internet

  • Free web hosting for agents, here.now

  • Enclose the horse game, enclose.horse

  • Duo Lingo for everything, wondering.app

  • Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe! (If you can’t read that, check this out)

  • Correlation does not equal causation. Fun site for data people. Get Spurious.

• Watched movies: Sinners, Dog Day Afternoon, Whiplash. Read book: The Vegetarian (had no idea what i was getting into but found it so unexpected and good payoff, was described as Kafkaesque). Saw show: Dog Day Afternoon (on broadway).

• Quotes/mantras that have been staying on my mind:

  • Insults are mirrors more than they are weapons

  • When something is painful, do it more often.

  • There is an infinite supply of love.

Some of the recent pics

Winter into Spring here in the north east

A Note to My Readers

I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. It has evolved into different formats over the years, but it currently serves as my public journal.

I use it to share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.

Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.

Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️