The Meter Is Not the Bill
Summary: I ran a usage tool across my AI coding assistants and it told me four weeks of work was worth $2,941.30. It wasn't a bill. Working out why it wasn't a bill meant actually mapping how four ...
Jeff Breece
Helen Gets a Command Surface
Summary: Helen, the default voice of my lab assistant, picked up three new abilities this week: she can run a small set of real operations by voice, she can answer general questions instead of defl...
Seven in the Morning: What Helen Says, and Why No Model Writes It
Summary: This is the last post in the series, and it's about the thing all the rest of it was for. At seven in the morning and seven in the evening, Helen tells me how the lab is. The interesting ...
A Refusal a Model Can't Be Talked Out Of
Summary: Helen can restart services on my machines. That made me uneasy enough to spend more time on the boundaries than on the capability itself. This post is about where the limits live, and the...
How Helen Came to Be: Four Voices and a State Machine
Summary: For most of this series the assistant has been an it. A pipeline. Somewhere along the way it stopped being one, and this post is about that transition — how the lab ended up with four dist...
The Coach That Doesn't Use a Model
Summary: The lab has a service that plans training sessions. It's the one people assume is most obviously a job for a language model, and it's the one where I most deliberately didn't use one. As ...
Looking Outward: A Small Data Lake for Public Sources
Summary: Everything so far has been about the lab looking inward — its own health, my own notes. This post is the one place it looks outward: a small data lake of public sources, collected on a sch...
Two Stages and a Refusal: Routing Inside the Memory
Summary: There are two routers in this lab. The gateway decides what kind of thing you're asking about. This one sits a layer down, inside the personal-memory service, and decides how to answer onc...
The Index That Was Quietly Empty
Summary: The previous post produced tidy tables from my daily notes. This one turns them into something searchable — a database for the crisp parts, a vector store for the language, and a nightly r...
Teaching the Lab to Know Me: Journals Into Structured Data
Summary: Everything so far has been infrastructure — machines, monitoring, a voice, a router. Useful, and none of it knows anything about me. This post is where that changes: a parser that reads my...