I build a lot of my own tools, to suit exactly how I want to work. Obviously, having a little thinky guy in the computer to do most of the busy work of making new tools accelerates that, but tools that make the LLMs suit me also accelerates my general work.

Some stuff I've built:

https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem - Tandem is a sysadmin buddy that travels with you over ssh. Just a wrapper over tmux and claude code (or whatever agent you like), it opens two panes in tmux, one with an ssh session to one of the hundreds of devices I maintain, and one with a local Claude Code configured to use a local work space and instructed via CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md to use tmux to interact with the remote machine. I built it because a lot of my coworkers were installing Claude Code on our robots and authenticating there to get help with robot troubles, and that felt bad. This allows them to keep all sensitive stuff locally and still get help troubleshooting directly on the device. I happen to find it useful, sometimes, too.

https://github.com/swelljoe/nelson - Nelson is a fancy Ralph loop for security bug hunting that I built to help audit my own software. It's also grown to include a benchmark suite I'm using to figure out which models are worth using for security work. I've published some of those benchmark results, and have a few hundred hours/dollars worth of new ones to publish this weekend. Turns out the benchmarking is more interesting, so that's gotten more attention than the bug-hunting side, but the benchmarks inform how the bug-hunting side works, and I added multi-model/multi-pass scans and de-dupe features recently because I found that letting models have a couple bites at the apple increases discovery, and there are bugs that only some models catch, and it's not always the top model that finds them. There's some overlap, but also some divergence. This research has also led me to start working on a harness for security auditing tasks; giving the agent tools and project structure data to lift detection and reduce false positives.

https://github.com/swelljoe/flar - FLAR is the Fast Light Agent Restrictor. It bubblewraps an agent so it is quite safe to use agents on your local machine, even with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` (which makes agents more fun to use). The sandbox feature found in most agents is porous and can be expanded by the agent harness itself. Similarly, if the agent introduces a supply chain attack into your code and runs it before you get a chance to audit/review it in a PR or run it through an SBOM dependency checker, the blast radius is exactly the project directory and the credentials/history of the one agent. (Whereas, without flar, the blast radius is your whole .ssh, github creds, all agent creds, your keyring, whatever secrets are in your home, etc.) This one is new. Just made it because I was talking about how I always put agents in VMs because I don't trust them. Someone suggested `srt` (https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime) and I like the idea but I don't like how complicated and huge and JavaScript it is. You can read and understand the entirety of `flar` in one sitting. Anyway, to break out of "prompt/response", you have to skip permissions, or call it via `claude -p` or API with tasks to perform. Nelson does the latter and `flar` does the former.

That's not to mention all the side projects and other stuff I've been able to make a lot of progress on.

The biggest one is finishing https://venturous.app/ (or, at least I made it do what I most wanted it to do, which is provide map overlays of US public lands and mobile data provider coverage so I can find cool places to camp free while staying connected). This is a re-implementation of an old defunct app called FreeRoam that I absolutely loved when I traveled full-time. I built half of it over several months by hand, and then Claude helped finish it in a few weekends and holidays. I'll get Claude to help build the mobile apps someday.