A friend of mine has years and years of concerts logged on Concert Archives. People she knows are on What I’ve Heard, which takes the shows you were at and displays every song you have ever heard a band play live, counts them up, and prints them as a poster. On a phone call she asked how hard it would be to share her history there too. While we talked, I pointed my agents at the question and let them run in the background. ...
My friend Nate Aune built MakerPerks, a curated directory of builder perks: free credits, discounts, and programs for startups, students, open source maintainers, and indie developers. There is a lot of real money sitting in those programs that most builders never claim. He talked about it on Sundai, the AI hacker community we are both part of, and I decided to see if I could build him an MCP server super quick. I may have gone a little overboard. It took a weekend, and the adapter is live at makerperks.mcpaql.com, built with MCP-AQL. Any MCP client can point at it and ask real questions: what can a student claim, what can an open source maintainer claim, how much is it worth, and where do you redeem it. ...
I just finished watching the season five finale of For All Mankind. No spoilers, but the whole show is filled with people in spacecraft stuck, slowly running out of resources of one variety or another. And, shortly after, I happened to catch this video on the World War II buoys anchored out in the English Channel to rescue downed pilots. My brain just decided to staple the two things together and do some napkin math to see if the idea would actually hold up. ...
The other half of the title. None of this is work. It is what happens when an idea is interesting enough to spend an afternoon and some order-of-magnitude math on, whether or not it goes anywhere. Concert Porter Site: mickdarling.github.io/concert-porter | GitHub: mickdarling/concert-porter | Write-up: The agents did most of this one A friend has years of concerts logged on Concert Archives and wanted them on What I’ve Heard. My agents worked out the interesting part while we were still on the phone: What I’ve Heard keeps no database of its own, it reads the setlist.fm archive, so moving a history is a matching problem. They built the matcher, the site, and the relay almost entirely on their own; my whole contribution was four requests. ...