FLIGHT RECORDER // ANDREW CARR
BLACK BOX
Engineering notes, systems I run, and the build logs for Arkwright, PayDown, Saltlight Cove, Ambervial and Hearth.
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Credentials Never Reach the Model
Publishing the WorkPulse MCP server: fourteen tools over a real invoicing API, two credential domains that never mix, batch rollback for every bulk write, and Streamable HTTP behind OAuth.
WorkPulse is the business-management app I run my own consulting through: clients, projects, time, invoices, expenses, pay periods. It has a REST API. For most of this year I've had a small MCP server sitting on top of that API so Claude Code and Claude Desktop can do the boring parts — "create an expense for $127.50 at Office Depot on the 20th, deductible" — without me tabbing into a form. Today I split it out of the private monorepo and published it.
READ →What an AI Facade Has to Actually Do
You do not govern generated code by reading it. Four things a real AI facade has to do — schema boundary, deterministic repair with receipts, fixtures that referee, an audit trail with no exceptions — each demoable against a Go binary in my closet.
I promised myself this post couldn't be written until it was true. It's true now — every claim below is a curl command against a Go binary running on a box in my closet.
READ →APR 3361
The number that started the whole containment project — and what it looks like today when the same mistake hits the facade.
Last month a local model read a credit-card statement and returned this:
READ →One day, from the first scan to a public front door
Hearth went from an empty folder to a media server with hardware-detected transcoding, TMDB metadata, accounts, and a public hostname in a single sitting. What got built, what broke, and what the numbers say.
Hearth is a media server for files you already own. Not a catalogue, not a store: a folder of video on a NAS, a browser, and the shortest honest path between the two. Plex and Jellyfin do this well. Hearth exists because I wanted to understand every piece of that path, and because the pieces that matter turned out to be small enough to own.
READ →T-Minus
Countdown's real now. Heads down, walls up, engines coming online.
The machines think, the factory defends itself, the ark rises, MONARCH watches. We're past the part where you have to imagine it. If you're on the manifest, stay on it.
READ →Hands On
First outside hands on a playable slice. They survived. Mostly.
One of them beat a wave by venting a byproduct line INTO the swarm — which, honestly, we're now calling a feature. The loop holds up in strangers' hands.
READ →Wishlist Incoming
Less glamorous week: standing up the storefront so there's finally somewhere to point all of this.
Steam page and the Kickstarter kit are coming together — capsules, screenshots, the whole storefront machine. The wishlist and pre-order lanes are almost live.
READ →First Cut
Rough teaser assembled — turrets, the tide, the ark, and one red eye to close it out.
Sixty seconds: the factory humming, the machine tide cresting a wall, the ark rising through the smoke, MONARCH's optic opening in the dark. For the first time the whole pitch lives in one breath.
READ →Cold Open: Titan
A first look past Earth — where the cold itself is the next thing hunting you.
Earth is just the tutorial. If you get the ark off the ground, you burn for Titan — where you have to generate heat to survive, and heat is exactly what the things in the methane lakes home in on.
READ →The bug that was never an iPad bug
Thought bubbles kept vanishing on the iPad. The screen size had nothing to do with it.
Every bed and workshop in the cove floats a little thought bubble: what it is making, how far along it is, whether it is ready. They kept going missing on the iPad. On the phone they were fine.
READ →The houses that were supposed to be rocks
Two little stone cottages had been sitting in the sea for weeks. Nobody put them there.
The note said: "I don't get the house on the beach and in the ocean. Why are they there."
READ →The icons that only existed on my Mac
Six buttons rendered perfectly in every screenshot and were blank on the phone. The one that survived explained why.
The screenshot came in from the phone: the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen, six of them, and five were empty white circles. The sixth had a tick in it.
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