Dev Notes
Dev Notes: March 6, 2026
TJ said something on the podcast this week that landed: he feels a weird anxiety now when Claude Code isn't actively running in the background. Like if AI isn't building something while he's doing dishes, he's wasting time.
I felt that immediately. I do the same thing.
We've talked for years about developer guilt: the weekend project pressure, the GitHub contribution graph, the constant pull to be building. AI tools were supposed to ease that. You'd go faster, accomplish more, stress less.
Instead, they raised the floor. The minimum productive state isn't "me coding" anymore. It's "me coding while Claude Code runs something in parallel." Step below that and you feel behind, even when you're not.
Here's the irony: TJ and I both just took breaks. Our calendars blew up with unexpected stuff. Full family schedules, trips, work stuff, all of it. We both stepped back from the podcast, newsletters, from side projects, from the grind. And when we came back, we shipped a lot. TJ launched Iris with a new batch of features. I rebuilt my entire website in about 24 hours.
The break didn't slow us down. It sharpened the return.
The tell is when you stop doing things that have nothing to do with a screen. No gym, no playing, no just sitting with your family without a laptop or phone nearby. Switching from day-job code to side-project code feels like rest because the intention is different. It isn't. It's still the same medium.
The anxiety of "AI should be building while I rest" assumes rest is idle capacity. It isn't. Rest is where you figure out what to build next, and why it matters.
This Week on Slightly Caffeinated
Taking Space, Site Redesign, Iris Launch and New Features
TJ and I caught up after a few weeks off. We talked about why stepping back is still necessary even when everything feels urgent, the full process behind rebuilding chrisgmyr.dev with Claude Code, and TJ's big Iris feature drop: proactive messaging, shell commands, agent skills, and citation support. A lot of ground covered.
New episode drops tomorrow (Saturday) at 8:30am Eastern.
What I'm Working On
I rebuilt chrisgmyr.dev from the ground up with Claude AI and Claude Code. The old site was on Hashnode. Fine for blogging, but there was no home for my newsletter, podcast, projects, or talks. I wanted one hub for everything, built with the tools I know: Laravel, Filament, Blade, Tailwind.
The workflow: design conversations in Claude chat first, then a detailed plan document, then phased builds in Claude Code. Total active time was about 24 hours. The site now pulls from the Transistor API for podcast episodes, the Buttondown API for the newsletter archive, and Unsplash for blog hero images. Everything lives in one place.
I wrote up the full process, including what worked, what I'd change, and how I used Claude Code remote sessions to keep things moving while away from my desk.
I Rebuilt My Personal Site with Claude AI and Claude Code. Here's Exactly How.
Links Worth Your Time
ReleaseBot.io - Aggregates release notes from AI companies, dev tools, and open source projects into one feed, plus a daily email digest. I've been using it for a few weeks to track Anthropic, Claude Code, and a handful of other tools. Free tier is solid. If you're trying to keep up with how fast this space moves, it cuts the noise down a lot.
Iris Early Access - TJ launched early access this week at $99. Built on Laravel and Prism, it's a personal AI assistant that can reach out to you proactively, run shell commands on your system, and use agent skills. The proactive messaging alone is a genuinely different experience. Worth checking out if you're interested in what "personal AI" looks like when it's not just a chat window.
Dev Tool of the Week
Start a Claude Code session locally, then connect to it from the Claude mobile app. Claude Code pauses at decision points and asks for input. Without this, those pauses mean coming back to a stalled terminal. With remote sessions, you answer from your phone, keep the session moving, and come back to a desk with more work done.
I used this constantly during the site rebuild. Waiting for my daughter to fall asleep, sitting on the couch after the kids went to bed. If you're building in short windows of time, set this up. It changes how you use the tool.
Yes, I'm aware I just spent 300 words telling you to rest more and I'm now recommending a tool for building from your couch. Sometimes the couch is for relaxing. I'm still working on that part.
That's it for this week. If you've tried the spec-first approach with Claude Code, or if you've found ways to manage the "always building" pressure, hit reply. I'd like to hear how others are handling it.
-Chris