Life Journal

Interlude #3 - the day Maester Luwin (Antigravity/Cursor) took over from Syrio Forel (Google AI Studio)

So my experiment with Google AI Studio (GAS) has really been a mixed bag. At first, I was skeptical when I saw people vibe coding "lite" versions of legal tech tools over a weekend. Then I started "converting" - the sheer momentum worked - it produced

Electrical cost of a coding agent

I asked ChatGPT to analyze the plausible electrical consumption of a Gemini coding agent. We assume that a typical coding prompt using high reasoning mode takes up 90 seconds (roughly consistent with my experience). We also rely on a Google paper that calculated the median Gemini prompt to be about

Interlude #2 (Contract Playbook): Syrio Forel, First Sword of Braavos… and Patron Saint of UI/UX That Looks Great Until It Meets DOCX

Interlude #2 (Contract Playbook): Syrio Forel, First Sword of Braavos… and Patron Saint of UI/UX That Looks Great Until It Meets DOCX Today’s detour away from redlines took an unexpected turn into the world of contract playbooks — courtesy of Google AI Studio, who in this universe is none

Interlude: A Lesson in Principle — Romo Lampkin and the Contract Playbook

Interlude: A Lesson in Principle — Romo Lampkin and the Contract Playbook Sometimes, progress doesn’t come in the straight line you expect. Today was one of those days. I stepped away from redlining contracts and diving deep into tracked changes. Instead, I took a detour — a diversion courtesy of Google

The MVP is DONE: After-Action Sunrise — Wiring the Strike Package

The MVP is DONE: After-Action Sunrise — Wiring the Strike Package The Ready Room looked different in the morning — not quieter, just calmer. The frantic haze of last night’s debugging had burned off, replaced by the cool, clinical feel of a weapons lab after a successful ignition test. Jester sat

Afterburners in the Hangar — Refined Map Goes Operational

The overhead lights in the hangar kicked on one row at a time, buzzing awake like runway strobes. Jester stepped in, coffee in hand, looking unusually serious — the kind of expression reserved for post-mission debriefs and IRS audits. Viper was already at the workbench, arms folded, eyes locked on the

Viper & Jester: Operation Track-Change Thunder — Test Flight Logs from the Word API Combat Zone

✈️ Test Flight Day – Viper & Jester Hit the Skies The next morning the hangar was already buzzing when Jester walked in, helmet tucked under his arm, flight suit half-zipped and coffee in hand. Viper was already pacing in front of the laptop like an instructor waiting for a junior pilot

Structure-aware diffing: a scorched earth rebuild

I re-looked again the approach in Harvey's engineering blog, namely: Addressing OOXML Challenges in the Word Add-In Microsoft Word documents are complex files that deal with formatting, styling, lists, links, tables, and other objects. Word documents are stored as Office Open XML (OOXML) packages, and a “.docx” file

We stopped accidentally killing whitespace civilians: Why refactoring to true word-mode Diff Match Patch gives us more reliable diffing

GPT-5.1: Below is a new blog post in the same cinematic military-operations style, but now telling the refactor story: JSOC discovers that the entire intelligence and planning apparatus must be rebuilt to deal with the real battlefield — one where whitespace is no longer collateral noise, but a citizen population

Turning Document Diffing Into a JSOC Kill Chain

I decided to write this narrative below with GPT-5.1, not just because I'm a Tom Clancy fan, but because I wanted to understand the codebase better and see missing angles. I instructed GPT-5.1 to capture the technical fidelity of the project. The basic idea is: being

📜 The Day the Kingdom Was Refactored — A Chronicle From the Red Keep War Room

(Based on a true debugging story) 📜 The Day the Kingdom Was Refactored — A Chronicle From the Red Keep War Room The great oak doors of the Small Council chamber groaned open as the King entered. The torches crackled. The long war tables were littered with scrolls, diagrams, execution logs, and

The Game of Diffs

I asked GPT 5.1 to write me a story on my struggles - pretty entertaining and quite representative. Here’s a playful blog-style post, as requested—your Word diff engineering saga told like a Game of Thrones episode: Battle for the Perfect Diff: My Game of Thrones Engineering Saga

My testing master manual

Testing Master Manual - Single Source of Truth This document is the authoritative guide for all testing, architecture rules, and stability loop workflows. Table of Contents 1. Executive Summary & Objectives 2. The Architecture 3. The Trace Schema 4. The Workflow (The "Loop") 5. Coding Standards (The Strategy

VPN is incredible

Recently, I only came to appreciate the power and beauty of VPN. I've long associated VPN only with "being able to access office resources and email while at home", but the technical beauty of it, is that it allows you to securely connect to an internal/

MS Word tracked changes API - test plan

Documenting my test plan requirements and implementing. 1. In the testing script, the script should check that the original test clause is present after each document refresh and that the same original test clause is being passed to the AI LLM, before each test run. If not, throw an error

MS Word API - document restoration

I'm building a test loop that requires me to reset the document to original state with a clause with no tracked changes. Documenting how I got it to work as it was a major pain. Summary of the Solution The solution uses a 4-step process: The Working Approach

Calendar tool shenanigans

The Day I Fought My Calendar (and Won) I just wanted one simple thing: ask my AI what day it is, and have it answer without tripping over itself. The reason is because self hosted models are weak at telling what the day is, when not provided with such information.

The journey so far, Open Web UI is the GOAT, troubleshooting image gen, and Qwen Image Edit

TLDR: Got Image Generation and Image Editing ("make this photo, anime style") onto Open WebUI today. All entirely self-hosted, using the very powerful Qwen Image Edit model released in September 2025 (which is based on the also very powerful Qwen Image model 20b). In October 2024, I was

My LLM as a 2nd brain – From “Unlimited Chat Memory” to “Adaptive Memory” – A Self‑Hosted Journey

When I first dipped my toes into the world of self‑hosting, the idea that kept me awake at night was simple yet powerful: unlimited, private chat memory. ChatGPT had been my go‑to for quick answers, brainstorming, and drafting. But I imagined a personal “second brain” that would remember

Superdoc diff redlining extension

This is a custom JS extension built for Superdoc, which is also a self-hosted, open source, browser-based docx editor. So obviously I didn't create the actual word editor platform, the only thing I did was to add the sidebar at the right, which lets you plug in a

AI and legaltech: Insights and counter insights

I think I sound like an old fogey whenever I tell fresh graduates that they should be happy that AI has not replaced them yet because it means that they can still learn the old fashioned way. But it's not really a "be grateful you have a

From Raspberry Pi to AI Workflows: A Personal Journey in Self-Hosting and Legal Tech

The following is a condensed version of a chat I had with ChatGPT Sora, which I asked it to turn into a Q&A form. The answers are paraphrased but core answers are mine. Q: Let’s start from the beginning — what sparked your tech journey? It all began

The 3-hour battle cycle

In Battlestar Galactica episode "33," the human fleet is being relentlessly pursued by the Cylons. Every 33 minutes without fail, the Cylons appear from nowhere and attack, forcing the exhausted fleet to make faster-than-light (FTL) jumps to escape. This cycle repeats for over five days, leaving the crew

The job of parenting

Imagine that you are in your final year of studies and you are interning at a big corporation. Everyone in the company has well defined roles and performs their jobs well. It is a well oiled machine. You are given some small tasks to help out and at the end

Toyama 2025

In summary, this was a good two week trip. We went for the so called Japan preschool exchange (misleading as there is no exchange, it is one way only ie Singapore kids go to Japan and not vice versa). You pay them a fee which includes both the accommodation and