Mount Abu

Four days of shipping, then a trip to Mount Abu and Ambaji with friends and 999 steps up a mountain.

weekly 016Oct 4, 20264 min read

Monday to Thursday was heads-down. Friday I left at 3am and didn't open a laptop until Sunday night.

The first half

ui lab kept going. It's at 73 stars and 11 forks, and two people who aren't me had PRs merged: owenps stopped the text scramble looping while you hover it, and halith-smh fixed Mastercard detection for 2-series card numbers. Both real bugs I'd shipped.

I also added a one-command install for every experiment, so you can pull any of them straight into your own project.

Then I sent a PR to shadcn/ui to get the lab into their registry directory. shadcn closed it with "added this to #12105", which merged two days later, so the lab is in the official community registry now. Getting folded into someone else's PR is a strange way to land your first contribution to a repo that size, but it counts.

The new experiments this week were mostly things I saw other people make and wanted to understand: a payment card with test numbers, QR reveal, a clock field, X walkers, a glass lens, an orbit gallery, a gooey menu, and a push-lock button with synthesized clicks. Each one credits whoever's idea it was, which feels like the minimum.

harness-lab came out of a talk I watched on agent harnesses. Seven small Python labs, stdlib only, one idea each: you are the model, verify instead of trust, a real model driving a real browser, a tool registry with its guardrails in code, three context policies raced on the same task, memory that survives between runs, and a loop that runs until a stop condition says stop. Built them all in one night.

Breakscale is at 1,223 stars. Shipped MCP 0.1.1 with some genuinely embarrassing fixes: the rates were reading zero because nothing was stepping a frame, and the engine wasn't counting arrivals it had no room for.

Also wrote up September, which still looks unreasonable typed out.

The Vercel OSS program came with a Pro trial, which is a nice problem to have after blowing past the free tier.

Stripe said no. That was after round two, on the Thursday. "Impressed with your work" and "didn't have a strong fit right now", which is the nicest possible version of it.

I also gave another interview that week which went well. Not naming it until I hear back.

And I turned down a chance to mentor at Inter IIT, because they wanted me on the product side and I wanted to be on software. Felt slightly mad saying no, still think it was right.

Mount Abu and Ambaji

Left at 3am on Friday with college friends and reached Abu around 10.

The first few hours were pure logistics: finding a rental bike, finding a hotel, eating kathiyawadi food somewhere in between. Then a shower, and out again to Delwara temples, and then to sunset point.

Saturday started early with Guru Shikhar, the highest point in the Aravallis, then Achalgarh fort.

Nakki Lake in the morning, before the boats filled up.

Then we packed and moved to Ambaji, found a hotel, and went for darshan at the Amba Mata temple. An hour or so in the queue before we got to the front.

Sunday was Gabbar. 999 steps to the top, and we did it without stopping once. Darshan up there, which after that climb hits differently. Took the ropeway back down, which felt like cheating and I have no regrets.

Then back to Abu, lunch, and a train to Jodhpur. Some of the group went for dinner and a movie. I wasn't hungry and didn't want a movie, so a friend, a junior and I came home instead.

What I found interesting

pi : an agent toolkit with a unified LLM API, agent loop, TUI and a coding CLI.
deepseek-harness : everything is a plugin.
The-Badge : firmware for a round 466x466 AMOLED badge. BLE trackpad, air mouse, clock, games, fidgets. Builds and runs on a PC too.
goboscript : a Scratch compiler, which is a sentence I enjoy.
harness-skills : structured agent skills for driving CI/CD in natural language.