Hi, I’m Nicholas Clooney, a seasoned engineer who loves building thoughtful, well-crafted software. For me, great software feels alive: clear in purpose, elegant in design, and reliable in every detail. I enjoy shaping systems that not only work well, but feel right, from the smallest UI polish to the architecture that holds everything together.
How AI made room for me to think BIG. Eleven blog themes I would never have found the time to design and build otherwise, explored over a day of on-and-off work while juggling three to five other projects. A design lab, plenty of rejected ideas, and a theme switcher I kept simplifying. Trying became cheap enough that I could afford to be picky.
With AI, I can work on four or five projects at once. The limit is no
longer what I can build. It's my own brain, and how much of what I do
I actually mean.
Running Mac Virtual Display and ALVR on an Apple Vision Pro at the same
time made ALVR stutter. The fix: put the router on a non-DFS 80 MHz block
with its primary channel on AWDL's social channel (44 in the UK), so the
Apple devices stop hopping between the router's channel and AWDL's.
I use the same coding agents in two opposite ways: fast and furious,
where I barely read the code and have made 10,000+ commits in the last
12 months, vs. slow and careful, where every decision is mine. Neither
is right. The real decision is where to set the quality bar for each
project, right now, and when to move it.
I got a good deal on a Codex plan and wanted to try its models inside Claude
Code. A local proxy and six small fish functions later, `claude-astra` starts
Claude Code on GPT-6-Astra. Here's how it's wired, how the agents built it,
and what's still missing.
The main agent, secondary and worker setup I pieced together by hand is now
built into tmux-agents. One command starts the chain, a script starts one for
every project after a reboot, and /resume brings back the conversations.
Move fast with AI, and add proper engineering when real usage shows you
need it. For tmux-agents, that meant letting each agent's name double as
its id, until it couldn't, and then adding real ids and guard rails so
the agents and I don't repeat the mistake.
Built-in sub-agents hand you a summary and the work behind it is gone.
tmux-agents gives every delegated task its own Claude or Codex session in
a tmux pane instead, so you can watch it, step in, and pick its
conversation up later.
With up to ten agents working on one project, the Claude agent I talked to
was also juggling replies, merges and servers, and I kept waiting for my
turn. The fix was one more pane: a main agent whose only job is to talk to
me, while the old one became a coordinator.
Claude, Codex and their sub-agents each got their own git worktree, and my
disk quietly filled up with copies of an 8GB game project. The fix was a
small script that makes agents borrow worktrees from a shared pool instead
of creating new ones.