Chop Wood Carry Water
Durable Agent Harness
I’ve been building a working relationship with coding agents — skills, rules, memory, signed patterns, and human gates — so the model does my work, not generic chatbot work. This site is the public notebook.
Start in 60 minutes
Start here
Pick a door. You don’t have to read the whole thing in one go.
Three clocks
Build your own harness
Anti-patterns
Kaizen → Hansei → Toyota Way Practices
MemPalace for memories
Do
Not
Toyota Way Practices — member practices
Runtime: Preloop + OpenRouter
PR / commit checks
Do
Not
Channels, media & token lean
Messaging, files, and context tax live in the same operating system. Same human gates as everything else.
Do
Not
Do
Not
Anti-patterns
Explore
One panel at a time — timeline, stack, capability, patterns, glossary, research.
Case studies
Measurement kit
Humbling baseline: METR’s early-2025 RCT found experienced open-source developers were about 19% slower on familiar issues when AI tools were allowed — while still believing they were faster. That does not kill the case for agents; it kills lazy multipliers.
Comparison bands
Weekly ritual
Starter kit
Blog
About
I’m Alex Lennon (@embedded_iot). This notebook is engineering notes in public — clocks, playbook, patterns, cases, starters, and a short blog. Steal what helps; measure your own results.
Public baseline v1.0.0 (2026-08-09) — release · what’s locked. Updates land in the end-of-week review when the week earned them.