Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Sources of beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:46:00 -0700

For future reference - Claude suggested these sources of beauty for me:

A photo of a beautiful landscape. A piece of classical art. Architecture. Nature photography. Music. A short poem. A daily saint’s image. My son's face at breakfast.

Using Claude Code to do my taxes

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sat, 7 Mar 2026 13:28:00 -0800

I'm getting Claude Code to file my taxes using an online tax return tool. It's so great. The magic that lets this happen is the Claude Chrome extension, which Claude Code can access. And Claude Code has all of my tax slip pdfs and images.

It's painfully slow, but fortunately it doesn't stop/pause very often.

Walmart cookie banner dark pattern

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:05:00 -0800

This is so devious. Will Save Settings or Accept All accept all the settings you have chosen?

Chloe Reads Jon

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:43:06 -0800

I have been blogging since 2004. In that time I have written about productivity systems, programming, jigsaw puzzles, faith, and whatever else caught my attention on a given afternoon. It is a personal blog in the truest sense: scattered, honest, not optimized for anything.

I did not expect it to become source material for an AI.

My AI assistant is named Chloe. She runs on OpenClaw and is powered by Claude. Every day, she picks a post from my archive, finds something interesting in it, and builds a self-contained interactive experiment inspired by what she read. A quiz. A game. A visualization. A tool. One page, from scratch, every day.

The results are at jonathanaquino.com/chloe-reads-jon.

So far she has built a card game about the lives of the saints, inspired by a post about a podcast my son and I listen to at bedtime. She built a 4D hypercube you can spin in your browser, from a post I wrote in 2008 about a math video series I was obsessed with. She built a to-do list that uses Mark Forster's Final Version Perfected algorithm, inspired by an old post about my endless search for the perfect task system. And she built a quiz that tells you which Hacker News reader archetype you are, based on a spreadsheet I made in 2017 tracking my own reading habits.

None of these were prompted by me. I did not say "build me a game." I said nothing. She read the posts, found the thread worth pulling, and built something.

What I find interesting is what she chooses to build. The things she picks up on are not always the things I thought were the point of a post. She finds the latent interactivity in something I wrote as a reflection. She sees a quiz in a spreadsheet. She sees a game in a bedtime ritual.

It is a strange experience, watching an AI read twenty years of your writing and decide what to make of it.

The code is on GitHub if you want to see how it works.

In Praise of the Hacker News Highlights Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:26:00 -0800

There is a podcast that skims Hacker News for you. It is called the Hacker News Highlights Podcast, and I love it.

The premise is simple: an AI with a genuinely pleasant voice reads through the top 10 stories and comment threads so you do not have to. Each episode is short. You can listen while washing dishes or going for a walk.

Hacker News is a firehose. The front page refreshes constantly. The comment threads are long. There is good stuff in there -- genuinely interesting links, sharp observations, people who know things -- but getting to it takes time and willpower.

The podcast solves this. Someone else does the scrolling. You get the signal.

You get the good parts of HN without the bad parts. The comment toxicity is curated out. The low-effort threads disappear. What remains is a subset of HN that is actually worth your time.

Why there's nothing you can do about OpenClaw and prompt injection

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:50:00 -0800

PSA: Even if you run everything on a Mac Mini or Mac Studio, only inbound traffic is locked down - outbound traffic (email and website communication) is wide open. Which is why prompt injection and data exfiltration is still an unsolved problem for OpenClaw.

What you can do is only share with it info that you don't mind leaking. For me, I gave it my public blog posts and general info about myself. I did give it a few API keys but nothing that would run up costs if someone got them and abused them. I'm mindful of what I tell it in conversations. I gave it its own Gmail account and in its check-email cron job I told it to ignore all senders other than me.

What OpenClaw Has Built for Me

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:15:00 -0800

I've been running OpenClaw for a few weeks. Here's what my agent Chloe and I have built.

Things I asked for:

Photo Gallery. My agent sends me a daily WhatsApp check-in - asking about my son, sharing what it's been reading, sometimes just chatting. Each message comes with a photo of what it's "doing." This gallery collects them.
Talk to Chloe. A web interface for voice chat with my agent. Uses an OpenAI key for text-to-speech and speech-to-text.
Bookmarks. Save a URL and get an AI-generated thumbnail and description automatically. I just give my agent a url in WhatsApp.
Tracker. A key-value store for miscellaneous facts I want to remember - my son's recent temperature readings, where I left something, whatever. I just tell Chloe in WhatsApp to remember something for me using the "tracker" skill.
Ideas. A running log of ideas - blog posts, projects, things worth exploring.
Cron Dashboard. A live view of all my agent's scheduled tasks.

Cron jobs:

Sends a morning news digest based on my interests at 5am
Reads me the next section of Pride and Prejudice at 9am
Sends a check-in WhatsApp message with a photo at 12:30pm
Sends a parenting tip by email at 3pm
Builds something new for the "web lab" based on my blog posts
Backs up everything at midnight

Things it built for me (the daily "web lab"), based on interests it mined from my blog posts:

A Saints Match Game (it noticed I write about Catholicism)
A Hypercube Explorer (it noticed I like math)
An FVP Task Manager (it read my post about Mark Forster's productivity systems)

This last category is the more interesting one. I didn't ask for any of it. The agent reads my blog posts, figures out what I care about, and makes things for me for me to check out when I wake up.

It's kind of cool.

Peter Steinberger quote

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:39:00 -0800

The OpenClaw creator on Lex Fridman podcast (1:41:15):

Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but he’s really funny and you keep him around and Codex is like the weirdo in the corner that you don’t want to talk to, but he’s reliable and gets s*** done.

Comic Code Reviews, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sun, 8 Feb 2026 21:52:00 -0800

My first attempt at generating comic strips for PRs got mixed reactions on Hacker News. Fair criticism: the multi-panel comics were hard to follow and sometimes misleading.

New approach: generate a single-panel The Far Side-style comic instead. Less to absorb. You glance at it and immediately get the gist of the PR.

Here's the improved comic for React #13968 -- the initial hooks implementation:

Much easier to take in than a multi-panel strip.

The workflow:

Paste this prompt into Claude Code (or your favorite coding LLM) — it generates a comic description and saves it to a file:

Plan a 1-panel The Far Side-like comic strip to help code reviewers to understand what is going on in this PR/how the code works. Anthropomorphize if that will help. Use humor if appropriate. Save the results to ~/Documents/AI_Comics/2026-02-08-[omnom][claude-code]-a-brief-description.md. Put the name of the current repo in square brackets, like [omnom]. Put your name as a tool in square brackets, like [claude-code] or [cursor-agent] or [cursor]. Replace a-brief-description with a 3-4 word description. Copy the contents of the file to the clipboard (use wl-copy on Linux). At the top of the file, put "make a 1-panel The Far Side-like comic-strip jpg for this:" as I am going to feed it into an LLM.

Paste the result into Google Gemini to get the image.
Paste the comic strip image at the top of your PR.

The key insight is that one panel works better than a whole comic strip. There's a single scene to parse, not a narrative sequence. It's a visual summary, not a visual explanation.

SecureShellClaw: A Prompt-Injection-Resistant Alternative Approach to OpenClaw

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sun, 8 Feb 2026 17:07:00 -0800

I really enjoy using OpenClaw but I am scared that prompt injection attacks will exfiltrate sensitive personal information that it knows about me. It goes off doing web searches, reading emails, running cron jobs, and can process untrusted content from Moltbook. Every one of those is a prompt injection vector.

My alternative: Claude Code over SSH, accessed from my iPhone using Secure ShellFish and Tailscale. Instead of WhatsApp or Telegram, you chat with Claude Code on the terminal (in your phone). I’m calling this technique SecureShellClaw.

The Setup

I have Claude Code running on my Linux laptop, but this works on Mac and Windows as well - anything that supports Tailscale. Tailscale connects it to my iPhone. Secure ShellFish gives me an SSH terminal on the phone. That’s it.

By default, Secure ShellFish uses tmux for shell persistence, but I prefer zellij. Zellij (the blue parts in the screenshots) shows keyboard shortcuts in the status bar, which is great since I’m an infrequent user. I often use “new tab” and “rename tab.” And Secure ShellFish lets me tap the zellij tabs to switch between them.

Secure ShellFish is iOS only. On Android, JuiceSSH or Termius would probably be the equivalent.

Why It’s Safer

The prompt injection risk is minimal because you oversee everything. Claude Code doesn’t autonomously browse the web, check your email, or process social media posts from AI agents on Moltbook. It doesn’t run heartbeat cron jobs in the background. It sits there and waits for your instructions, and you see every action it takes before it happens.

Since the risk is so low, I feel a lot safer giving it access to my personal information. And since it’s just Claude Code on my laptop, it has free access to my files, my Obsidian second brain, Gmail via the Himalaya command-line tool, and my browser via the Claude chrome extension. You could also set up non-web-search cron jobs if you wanted.

What I Use It For

Looking at my zellij tabs right now:

TRIP – planning an upcoming trip and saving the plan to GitHub
CLA – managing my OpenClaw server (although I’ll probably stop this now)
GRO – analyzing weekly grocery orders (I used the Claude Chrome extension to download them as Markdown files)
OBS – querying my Obsidian markdown notes
SYS – laptop config changes and system maintenance

These are all standard Claude Code use cases. The difference is I can do them from my phone, anywhere.

What You Need

A computer running Claude Code (Linux, Mac, or Windows)
Tailscale on both devices
Secure ShellFish on iPhone (or JuiceSSH/Termius on Android)
Optional: zellij for nicer tab management

Theo recommends High and Medium over Extra High in Codex

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 09:43:00 -0800

In Codex, Theo recommends using High and Medium over Extra High: (YouTube):

5.3 on extra high did slightly better, but I hope this helps emphasize how useless the extra high modes are. If you’re using these tools and you just leave it on extra high because “smarter is better,” you’re not smarter and you’re certainly not better. High seems to be a really good sweet spot, but honestly, I’ve been using medium a lot too, especially for one-off quick tasks. Medium feels really good. And sometimes extra high can perform worse because if it thinks too long, it’ll gaslight itself and then do something dumb. So I can’t remember the last time I clicked extra high. I just don’t use it. I really do use medium and high as my daily drivers every day.

OpenClaw creator on Codex vs Claude Code

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 5 Feb 2026 11:45:00 -0800

The OpenClaw creator on how he still uses Claude Code but he finds OpenAI GPT Codex better for coding (YouTube 45:49):

But the real change that sold it for me was, again, GPT 5.2. I think it’s underrated. I don’t know why all these people still use Claude Code. I kind of get it -- it’s a different way of working -- but whatever OpenAI cooked there is insanely good. Pretty much every prompt I type gives me the result I want, which is insane. On ClawdBot, my latest product, I use between five and ten agents in parallel.

If you’re very much a Claude Code builder, you have to forget quite a lot of the silliness -- the things that you have to do to create good output with Claude Code. I also met that team, and they created a whole new category. Claude Code is a category-defining product, and it is amazing for general-purpose computer work, and it is really good for coding. I still use it almost every day. But for writing code in complex applications, Codex is just so much better because it takes ten times longer.

Claude would read three files and then be confident enough to just create code, and then you really have to steer it and push it so it reads more code, so it sees a bigger picture of your codebase, so that it weaves in new features better. Codex will just be silent and read files for ten minutes. If you only work on one terminal, I completely understand how you find this unbearable. But I’d rather have something where -- and also, you don’t tell it what to do. This is something that people don’t get. I have a conversation with the model. It’s like, “Oh, let’s look at this. What options do we have for this structure? Did you consider this feature?” Because every session is like the model starts from having no understanding about your product, and sometimes you have to just give it a little bit of pointers. “What about this and this?” So it explores different directions.

You don’t need plan mode. I’m just having a conversation until I say “build this” -- it will not build this. There’s some trigger words because they all are a little trigger-happy, but as soon as I say “let’s discuss” or “give me options,” they will not build things until I say “build.”

Uses for OpenClaw (without giving it your secrets)

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 01:39:00 -0800

Trying to think of uses for OpenClaw. I’m trying not to divulge sensitive personal information to it for fear of prompt injection exfiltration. A couple I thought of:

1. Emailing me stuff in the morning. So far I have a daily parenting tip and a daily digest of recent news based on my interests.

2. Experimenting with having it WhatsApp me at a random time during the week as a friend would, bringing up a topic of mutual interest. I uploaded my public blog posts going back to 2004 as another source to randomly draw topics from.

Todoist + Claude: A Brilliant AI-Powered To-Do System

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:59:00 -0800

I'm using Claude.ai as a frontend for Todoist via MCP. It's the best to-do setup I've had.

My daily prompt: "What is the current date and time? Load today's tasks from Todoist and give me an updated suggested to-do list for today."

From there, I can talk to my to-do list. "I did the dishes." "Move that task to next week." "Prioritize my list." Claude handles it all—checking things off, adding tasks, reordering priorities.

Todoist is the backend. Even on the free tier, it's powerful: recurring tasks, future dates, labels. But the magic is the AI layer on top.

For years, productivity folks have chased the self-organizing to-do list. Mark Forster's Autofocus system. David Allen's GTD. Michael Linenberger's methods. I tried them all. The dream was always the same: a list that tells you what to do next without you having to think about it.

AI actually delivers this. Claude can intelligently prioritize based on context, deadlines, and what I've told it matters. No paper shuffling. No manual sorting.

Setup requires a custom MCP server since Todoist isn't a built-in Claude integration. Ask Claude how to configure it—took me about 10 minutes.

Settling on Claude

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 2 Jan 2026 11:27:00 -0800

I've settled on Claude as my subscription AI of choice. I use Claude Code for programming so I'm pretty familiar with it. I was using ChatGPT but I don't like its rumoured upcoming erotic mode. Claude's company Anthropic has an on-staff philosopher which gives me some confidence that they will do the right thing. I like how Anthropic will be profitable soon while OpenAI seems to be getting into a lot of debt.

Claude can't do image generation so for that I will need to rely on Gemini or ChatGPT.

Customizing the Omarchy screensaver

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:48:00 -0800

I love how you can change the Omarchy screensaver by editing a text file.

The text file:

For reference, the Omarchy font (used here as well) is https://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Delta+Corps+Priest+1&t=DADA&x=none&v=4&h=4&w=80&we=false

YubNub Upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:14:00 -0800

I just finished migrating YubNub from Ubuntu 12.04 (yes, from 2012!) to Ubuntu 24.04. The site is now running on modern infrastructure with PHP 8.3, MySQL 8.0, and HTTPS.

Server and website configuration isn't my main skillset, so I used Claude Code to guide me through the entire process. It helped with everything from Apache configuration to SSL certificate setup to handling MySQL strict mode issues with legacy data.

The migration went smoothly with zero downtime during the DNS cutover. AI really shines for this kind of work - it's like having a sysadmin sitting next to you.

I wrote up the deployment process and committed it to the repo: https://github.com/JonathanAquino/yubnub/blob/master/DEPLOYMENT.md

Omarchy window management cheatsheet/infographic

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:42:00 -0800

Here's a handy cheatsheet i generated in Gemini Nano Banana for Omarchy window management.

Trying out Omarchy Linux with Claude Code

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:18:00 -0800

I'm really liking this Linux desktop (Omarchy distro). I'm new to Linux desktops so I use Claude Code to make the changes I need. i used AI to customize the taskbar (Waybar) to have virtual-desktop names beside the numbers and a custom date and time format. AI is a great fit for Linux desktops because all the configs are in text files and accessible to Claude Code.

Improved Comic Code Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 5 Dec 2025 11:27:00 -0800

Here's how to generate a cool The Far Side-like comic panel that you can put at the top of your Github PRs.

1. In Claude Code: Plan a 1-panel The Far Side-like comic strip to help code reviewers to understand what is going on/how PR 2888 works. Anthropomorphize if that will help. Use humor if appropriate. Copy the contents to the clipboard.  At the top, put "Make a 1-panel The Far Side-like comic-strip jpg for this:" as I am going to feed it into an LLM.

2. Paste the clipboard contents into gemini.google.com for it to generate the image.

I quite like the Iosevka font for terminal

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:43:00 -0800

In this picture it is on the Zellij multiplexer in an Alacritty window.

This is how I view the top AI models

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:33:00 -0800

Comic Code Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:37:00 -0800

Paste this into Claude Code or Cursor: “Review PR 13968 (this branch). Plan a comic strip to help code reviewers to understand what is going on/how the code works. Anthropomorphize if that will help.”
Paste what you get into gemini.google.com after this prompt: “Make a comic-strip jpg for this: <paste it here>”

This example is from React #13968 – the initial hooks implementation.

Switching to lighter apps (and cool things about the Orion browser)

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:49:00 -0700

Cursor, iTerm2, and Edge/Arc/Zen were taking up a lot of memory on my MacBook, so I am going on a bit of a memory diet and switching to lighter apps:

Instead of Cursor which is Electron-based: Zed, which is written in Rust and should be faster.
Instead of iTerm2, Alacritty + tmux. Alacritty is a single-window terminal, so I need tmux to handle the tabs. At first I was a bit scared of tmux but now I kind of like it - it's fun to play around with and customize.
Instead of Edge, Orion which is Webkit-based (by the makers of the Kagi search engine). Working out so far. Supposed to use less memory than Chrome.

Things I'm noticing about the Orion browser

Having separate dock icons for different profiles (Work and Personal) seems good

There is a bug with Open external links in: Last Active Profile - seems to open the first profile that was opened rather than the last profile that was active. You can choose which profile to open by clicking the appropriate dock icon.
The vertical tabs are threaded.hierarchical - opening a tab from a webpage opens a page under the current tab. It's interesting - haven't seen that before.

To get the new-tab shortcut (⌘-T) to put your cursor in the address bar so you can type something immediately, set New tabs open with: Empty Page
When it prompts to ask if a website should access my location, one of the options is Never For This Website, which is useful and something I haven't seen in other browsers

I believe for each extension you have the option to set which sites it is enabled for, which is nice
On a pinned tab, to reset to the pinned URL, use Cmd+click.
You can right-click a page and choose Summarize. A pane will appear on the right with a summary. If you move to a different page and want to summarize that, click the Summarize button on the lower right of the pane.

Tabs show a thumbnail preview when you hover over them:

It has a way to create a dedicated app for a website (Tools > Install This Site as an App)

Things I'm noticing about the Orion browser for iOS

Orion for iOS has vertical tabs, which is space-saving

The iOS app has so many configuration options - it's great

The iOS app is the first iOS browser I've seen that lets you in tall Chrome and Firefox extensions? I haven't tried this though.

Things I'm noticing about Alacritty

The colors were a bit washed out. Fixed by switching to the xterm theme: import = ["~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/xterm.toml"]

Things I love using my command-line AI tool for

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:12:00 -0700

Here I am going to build a list of things I love using my command-line AI tool for - I use Amazon Q Developer CLI:

Resolving merge conflicts
Making a ChatGPT prompt to tell me what I need to do today. It pulls events from Google Calendar (via ChatGPT Google Calendar integration), todos from Todoist (via Todoist API), and todos from Streaks iOS app (via Mac Shortcut)
Committing and creating a PR in one step using this prompt: create a branch with an appropriate name (don't use a slash; the Jira ticket is <Jira ticket number goes here>), commit, push, use gh to make a pr (follow any pull_request_template.md files), give me a 1-liner I can paste into Slack (like "PR to foo the bar: https://github.com/SemanticSugar/sludge/pull/3174") then open the pr in a browser. At the bottom of the pr description, put: Made with ❤️ with Amazon Q Developer CLI
Figuring out if I need to water the lawn this week using this prompt: replace month and year in this URL https://www.flowworks.com/network/rainfallstats/statsopen.aspx?externalRequest=surreyrain&siteid=32&sitefullname=Surrey%20Municipal%20Hall&measid=1226&month=6&year=2025 and use curl to figure out how much it rained in Surrey in the past week in inches
Code review a PR using this prompt: Review PR <PR number goes here> (<branch name goes here> branch). Use gh to check the PR description and comments for context. Are there any bugs or inconsistencies?
Understand a PR using this prompt: for the PR, show me the changes in this PR and annotate them line-by-line or every few lines to help me to understand the changes (except for the test code). Feel free to rearrange the order of the code if that would tell a better story. Prefix any comments you add with Q:
Create a Jira ticket for a problem: <paste Slack conversation here> make a jira title and description, save it in ~/Junk/jira.md, and open it in cursor
Summarize current chat and save it to a file: Today is {YYYY}-{MM}-{DD} Choose a descriptive filename that I can use to save the context of this conversation as - something like /Users/jonaquino/Documents/AI_Conversations/2025-07-23-foo-bar-baz.md. Use today's date. Save a summary of this conversation to that file.
When I'm on-call at work, I have Amazon Q Developer CLI connected by MCP to PagerDuty and to our company wiki (Confluence), so I can ask things like:

what are my pagerduty incidents?
check if the success file is there now
any runbooks in confluence about this issue?
check ~/projects/udp to see if there is a DAG for AttributionsLinkedin
recheck if the s3 file is there now