What I'm doing now.

A /now page. A snapshot of where my attention is, not a feed.

Farsun launches November 1

The new one. Farsun is a free-flight gravity shooter for iPhone and iPad, and it has one rule: gravity bends every shot, yours and theirs. There are no formation grids and no patterns to memorize. Squads flow through a field of stars, black holes, and pulsars, and you learn to slingshot your fire around a star instead of aiming straight at anything.

The home screen is a star chart you fly sector by sector. Every pilot flies the same daily sector, and a finished run leaves an echo, the ships you failed to kill, which a rival inherits as an extra wave. That makes duels work at any hour without both people being online. Seasons run two months each, with an expedition that changes one rule of the board and a constellation you light star by star and keep. Six of them are built for the first year.

It's Swift, SpriteKit, and a Metal post chain, with no ads, no tracking, and one optional cosmetic purchase. The new tool this time was ElevenLabs: every sound in the game, 81 effects and a layered score for each region and season, came through its API and a small pipeline that picks, trims, and loops the takes. The whole soundtrack fit in one $11 month of the Creator plan. Launch day opens a two-week event called First Light. The beta is open until then, and anyone who flies it keeps a ship finish that can't be earned after launch.

TripChronos 3.0: a folding iPhone and a trip planner

The next big TripChronos release is built around two things. The first is iPhone Duo. Opened up, the app stops being a stretched phone layout: your trips sit beside the trip you have open, the itinerary runs next to a live map, and the video editor gets two panes. Half-fold it and each pane takes one side, clear of the crease. Close it and you're where you left off on the outer display.

The second is planning. Until now TripChronos was about remembering a trip; 3.0 helps before you leave. Give it your stops, how many nights, your pace, and what you're into, and it drafts the trip day by day, with sights, a few quieter finds, and somewhere to eat at mealtimes. It can plan a single free day around what's already booked, work out the drives between hotels, and suggest places worth getting out for on a long one. Nothing touches your itinerary until you say so.

The suggestions come from Apple's Foundation Models, and the part I spent the most time on is not trusting them. Every place the model names gets looked up in Apple Maps and is dropped unless it's really there, near the stop. The arithmetic (stop order, drive times, spreading places across days) is ordinary code with no model in it. It runs on your device or through Apple's Private Cloud Compute, with no third-party AI service and nothing passing through a server of mine. On a phone without Apple Intelligence the planner still works, from Apple Maps alone.

The same models read booking confirmations. Hand it screenshots or PDFs, up to ten at a time, and they become flights, trains, stays, and cruises with their port calls, with the originals filed in the trip's documents. No date yet.

Prism Runner 5.0, four months on

The Swift, SpriteKit, and Metal rebuild I spent the spring on is out — version 5.0 landed on the App Store in June as the biggest update in the app's history. Because the rewrite mutated the existing Xcode project in place, the bundle ID, entitlements, and purchases all carried over: existing players got a whole new engine as a regular over-the-air update.

The world got rebuilt along with the runtime. Runs now travel through twelve hand-painted biomes — Nebula Drift, Crystal Cave, Void Storm, Cherry Blossom Garden, Kelp Forest — connected by cinematic transitions, each with its own music and signature hazard. New dimension powers (Hyperdrive, Shield, Magnet), Prism Mode at a 10× combo, all at 120fps on ProMotion.

I wrote up how the in-place rebuild went in Shipping a rewrite as just another update.

Experimenting with AI-assisted development

All of the above was built AI-first, and I'm going deeper on the practice itself: prompting techniques, spec-driven workflows, and agent patterns — what it takes for coding agents to build reliably, and how the developer's job shifts toward architecture, judgment, and review when they do.

Building, not just reading. I open-sourced ragcli, a "RAG-in-a-Box" CLI for chatting with your documents from the terminal, and I'm running a document retrieval and Q&A service on FastAPI, PostgreSQL with pgvector, and Redis workers, with large-scale embedding workloads on AWS Bedrock.

Less interested in chasing the model-of-the-week, more interested in the parts that will still feel useful in twelve months.

AWS, passport stamps in progress

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner in hand; currently working through the Developer Associate study path. Deeper into IAM, Lambda, DynamoDB, and the bits of the platform I want to lean on for side-project backends.

Otto things, travel things

Trying to take Otto somewhere new at least once a month. He has opinions about rest stops and is generally correct about them.