when everything breaks, do it yourself

29 Mar, 2026

i ran my life on iOS Shortcuts and coffee. i had, after many years of patient assembly, constructed a golem — a lurching and muttering thing built from the stolen clay of a dozen apps. It animated by inscriptions i wrote myself in the small hours. Things called Other Things. Other Things whispered arcane knowledge to Other Other Things. Tasks got done; deadlines were met and the whole apparatus clattered forward like a haunted assembly line, faithful and foul-smelling.

then the words started to rot.

it wasn't dramatic. golems rarely die in dramatic fashion. one daemon fell silent, then another. API calls that had run faithfully for years began returning nothing, cheerfully, without apology. i patched. i rebuilt. i recarved the words. but systems built from clay carry a cost you don't read in the documentation: they are not yours. when the landlords change the locks, you are left standing at the door with a keyring full of nothing.

months passed. maybe a year. probably more. i have been unable to corral them consistently and, consequently, have felt adrift in an endless cosmos of tasks, projects, and forever-mutating due dates.

it is untenable. i am untenable. untended.

untended and focused is no way to persist in the mechanism of capitalism and i, good little cog with a forge and a new assistant, have chosen the daunting path. i'm building a new tool. one that does not rely on capricious calls to APIs that slumber in unseeable depths. one whose inscriptions are mine, whose clay i chose, whose demons answer to no landlord but me.

it has been... revelatory? i have the skills to design flows, inputs, outputs, incomes and outcomes — and enough coding knowledge to get myself into good trouble. in about an hour of writing feature lists, arguing with existing UIs, and cataloguing what was eternally broken in my existing systems, i had produced a working prototype.¹

Work In Progress

it is far from complete. but i am learning that understanding design — the bones and the blood of it — means you can assemble something that was never assembled before. not borrow a golem. forge one.

appropriately, it is already trolling me.

Footnotes

#code