Hey, welcome to issue 6 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! I finally took the Apple Watch Ultra 3 out for a phone-free workout, and a burst of vibe coding produced a fresh Obsidian sync and AI job runner. We capped the week by loading the bikes onto the GO Train and spending Saturday tracing Hamilton’s trails, with plenty of Old Man’s War universe lore from The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi riding shotgun in my head.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been experimenting with “vibe coding.” Instead of writing code myself, I’ve been using the “vibe coding” tool Codex to do a couple of things with my Obsidian vault: An agentic vault organizer that sorts any new file in my inbox into the appropriate subfolder, adding tags and wiki links to other files as needed. A weekly email newsletter generator that scans my vault (including draft posts and recently saved bookmarks) to create my weekly newsletter. I tried this last week as an experiment and may try again. This worked well enough by syncing my vault files to my Raspberry Pi 5, SSHing into it, and running Codex there with prompts that let it process the vault files according to my instructions. The only problem: I had to babysit it with an open terminal session. That didn’t work when I wanted to kick the process off from my phone or walk away and let my laptop sleep (closing the terminal session stops Codex by default)

Hey, welcome to issue 5 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! I spent the week coming down from a Vegas conference high, tightening up some of my automations, and generally trying to keep the post-conference energy focused on things that will actually ship. What I’ve Been Up To #Most of the week centred on the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit, where every morning in the Fontainebleau’s Royal Ballroom kicked off with Gene Kim before diving into talks like “Scaling AI Adoption Across 3000+ Developers at Booking.com,” “State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025 (DORA Report),” and “Making AI Agents Actually Work for You.” It was a wall-to-wall reminder that AI isn’t just hype—it’s now the baseline expectation for modern engineering teams.

I’ve never been good at keeping my files neatly organized. My Obsidian _Inbox/ fills up, my root directory gets cluttered, and the good intentions of “I’ll sort it later” rarely turn into action. So I finally asked: why not get a computer to do it automatically for me? That’s where Codex came in. Wait, What’s Codex? #Codex is primarily designed as a coding assistant—think of it as an AI that can help generate code, suggest fixes, and automate developer workflows. But it’s not just an API in the cloud. The Codex CLI is a command-line tool that runs directly on your computer. You can feed it a prompt and it acts like an agent: executing multi-step jobs locally, moving files, editing content, even committing to git.

I’ve just finished Day 2 of the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in Las Vegas. I initially wanted to attend to get some ideas to bring back to one of my teams at work to help improve their development workflow. The conference is organized by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook, so I expected lots of tips about DevOps best practices. It turns out DevOps is basically just table stakes at this point. Not surprising, but the majority of the conference was focused on AI.

One more test to see that new posts are getting picked up by my Active Pieces workflow automatically.

I’m on my way to a tech conference this week in Las Vegas. My flight was delayed by five hours (sigh), so I had a little time to kill. Luckily I had my laptop and decided to fix up my rss2social workflow on Active Pieces. I got annoyed testing the workflow because every time I ran it, it would spam my accounts with posts that had already been published. I decided to try Active Pieces’ table functionality: I initially loaded a CSV of every post I made on the site and had the workflow check the table first. If an entry wasn’t there, it would post and then add the URL for next time. I grabbed the site’s RSS file to get all the URLs and asked ChatGPT to convert it into a CSV I could import.

I’m on my way to a tech conference this week in Las Vegas. My flight was delayed by five hours (sigh), so I had a little time to kill. Luckily I had my laptop and decided to fix up my rss2social workflow on Active Pieces. I got annoyed testing the workflow because every time I ran it, it would spam my accounts with posts that had already been published. I decided to try Active Pieces’ table functionality: I initially loaded a CSV of every post I made on the site and had the workflow check the table first. If an entry wasn’t there, it would post and then add the URL for next time. I grabbed the site’s RSS file to get all the URLs and asked ChatGPT to convert it into a CSV I could import.

Welcome to the Coefficiencies newsletter issue 4! A few short links this week about new Apple stuff, another video game I’m digging, some Obsidian nerdery, and a little bit of reflection about self-care. Let’s dig in! Apple Week #The new Apple stuff dropped this week: new phones (including the very sleek-looking iPhone Air), new AirPods Pro (they look awesome), new Apple Watches, and new OSes across the board!

Welcome to the first issue of the new Coefficiencies newsletter! I thought I’d try the newsletter thing after running the blog for a while to see if I can find a new audience for my writing. While RSS is still my “ride or die,” I know a lot of folks like the simplicity of having something drop in their inbox every week. And I have say, there are a few newsletters I’ve really come to look forward to, especially The Installer from the Verge and the Hiro Report from, well, Hiro!

Hello, and welcome to issue 2 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! Just a couple of links today and one quick thought. Enjoy! Links #Longplay #I came across this article by Craig Grannell about LongPlay, the album-centric music player for iOS and macOS, and why it’s the best music app—and I couldn’t agree more. LongPlay connects to your Apple Music library and shows you all of your complete albums, filtering out singles or albums where you don’t have the full collection. By default it shows a wall of albums that you can sort (and size!) in different ways, and lets you sort your albums into collections.

I’ve long found web-based “low code” automation tools like IFTTT, Make.com and Zapier handy for automating small web-based workflows— posting to social channels, updating records in Airtable or Notion, and the like. While I can often script these workflows in Python and run them on my Raspberry Pi with a cron job, there’s a lot of overhead: figuring out each service’s APIs and installing Python dependencies that make handling them easier. You also have to create log files to troubleshoot when things go wrong. So it’s nice to have a web UI to quickly build workflows with built-in logging and pre-configured steps for different services, so you don’t have to learn every API. Plus, I’m a visual thinker, so seeing workflows mapped out visually helps me get my head around them.

I’ve long found web-based “low code” automation tools like IFTTT, Make.com and Zapier handy for automating small web-based workflows— posting to social channels, updating records in Airtable or Notion, and the like. While I can often script these workflows in Python and run them on my Raspberry Pi with a cron job, there’s a lot of overhead: figuring out each service’s APIs and installing Python dependencies that make handling them easier. You also have to create log files to troubleshoot when things go wrong. So it’s nice to have a web UI to quickly build workflows with built-in logging and pre-configured steps for different services, so you don’t have to learn every API. Plus, I’m a visual thinker, so seeing workflows mapped out visually helps me get my head around them.

So after getting Active Pieces set up successfully, it started crashing on me. ChatGPT looked at the logs and suggested disabling “telemetry,” which seemed to be the culprit. I did that, and it ’s been running okay so far. Just in case, I created a second Active Pieces flow: a job that runs every five minutes and calls a healthchecks.io URL to report everything is fine. If healthchecks doesn’t get a ping for more than five minutes, it will alert me so I can restart it.

I’ve long found web-based “low code” automation tools like IFTTT, Make.com and Zapier handy for automating small web-based workflows— posting to social channels, updating records in Airtable or Notion, and the like. While I can often script these workflows in Python and run them on my Raspberry Pi with a cron job, there’s a lot of overhead: figuring out each service’s APIs and installing Python dependencies that make handling them easier. You also have to create log files to troubleshoot when things go wrong. So it’s nice to have a web UI to quickly build workflows with built-in logging and pre-configured steps for different services, so you don’t have to learn every API. Plus, I’m a visual thinker, so seeing workflows mapped out visually helps me get my head around them.

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