Mick Darling
Work and Play - Media/Tech, Projects, and Commentary
Work
Tools, specifications, and the lab they come out of.
- Dollhouse Research
Building blocks for AI customization, plus the experiments that check whether the claims about them actually hold up.
- DollhouseMCP
An MCP server for AI customization. Personas, skills, templates, agents and memory that hot-swap without restarting, across Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
- MCP-AQL
A query layer over MCP tools. Address, query and compose across tools instead of calling them one at a time. In daily use, not theoretical.
- AILIS
A proposed sixteen-layer reference model for the AI stack, roughly what OSI did for networking. Public, citable, and meant to be argued with.
- Elemental Surveys
Fast synthetic survey reads that pressure-test concepts, messaging and audience assumptions before the expensive commitment is made.
- Merview
Markdown editor with live Mermaid rendering, entirely client-side. Finished on purpose. I use it every day and it does not need a roadmap.
Play
Ideas worth an afternoon and some order-of-magnitude math.
- Orbital Lifeboats
Could you pre-position emergency caches in orbit the way the Channel had rescue buoys? Orbital mechanics flips it: the lifeboat has to come to you.
- airpods-mcp
AirPods head-tracking turned into a computer input system: dwell selection, cursor control, window-at-point and spatial speech panning. Built in a day.
- Think Like an Alien Engineer
If a Dyson swarm existed out there, could we actually spot it? Structures that big cannot hide their waste heat, so I worked out which signatures physics forces them to leave and which are worth hunting for.
Posts
- The Window Clock Is Shrinking
Adoption windows for new technologies that become standards have compressed roughly 100x in fifty years. Measuring schedules as percentages of that window instead of in weeks changes how you decide when to start the clock.
- Orbital Lifeboats: Napkin Math for Space Rescue
A side-quest exploring whether you could pre-position emergency rescue caches across the solar system, and the orbital mechanics that make it weird.
- Hooks, Not Hopes: Permissioning AI Tools with DollhouseMCP
How DollhouseMCP evaluates tool calls before they run, applies allow, confirm, and deny rules from active elements, and shares or syncs those rules with hosts like Claude Code and Codex
- Building a Lightweight CMS from Parts
Assembling a folder-based publishing workflow from Hugo, GitHub Actions, and simple scripts
- Welcome to the New Site
Why I rebuilt mickdarling.com from scratch in a day