Dev Notes
Dev Notes: September 28, 2026
The last issue of Dev Notes went out on June 15. Then I went quiet for three months.
I didn't stop working. I did the opposite. I spent that stretch building, and I shipped four projects along the way. What I didn't do was tell anyone about them. On last week's podcast, TJ mentioned he's been publishing a blog post every week, and I caught myself saying "so many blog posts to write and not enough time." That's the whole problem in one sentence. I'd been juggling five or six projects a week and treating writing as the thing I'd get to once everything settled down.
Things don't settle down on their own. So this issue is me landing a couple of planes: here's what I built, and here's what's coming next.
What I've Been Building
Hive is now open source and on npm as @cmgmyr/hive. I call it a meta harness. It runs on top of Claude Code and Codex hooks, so a lead session can plan the work, spin up workers, and check what they produce. The real power is in profiles. A profile holds your runbook and your lead and worker instructions, so each project can work exactly the way you want. Hive sits underneath everything else on this list.
Avocet is a local-only meeting recorder and transcriber. I built it because Krisp's speaker matching kept slipping, and I was spending way too much time fixing speakers by hand. Avocet builds voice prints and suggests speakers with a confidence score. You can assign a single phrase or a whole meeting, and you can merge duplicate speakers. Your audio, transcripts, and speaker data never leave your Mac. TJ canceled his Krisp subscription after one week on it. The beta starts in the next few weeks, and you can join the waitlist on the site.
Lookover is a manual-testing queue for agents. When an agent hits something it can't check on its own, it drops the task into a local SQLite queue. You work through the queue in a UI whenever you have time, attach a screenshot or a note, and tell the agent "feedback given." You stop losing the checklist when the chat scrolls away.
Jig is a workbench for ideas and POCs, the things that deserve more than a chat but less than a full project. Jig gives each idea its own folder and keeps an index of all of them. It also nudges you to archive the ones you haven't touched in a while.
Lookover and Jig are both open source too.
This Week on Slightly Caffeinated
New Models, Open Source Hive, and Avocet
TJ and I react to Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol and Luna landing on the same day. Then I walk through all four projects above. If you want the longer tour, with TJ poking holes in it, this is the episode.
Out now.
Coming Soon
Each of these projects needs more than a paragraph, so the next few weeks of blog posts will go deeper.
First up is a proper Hive walkthrough: why it exists, how the lead and workers split the work, and how to get it running on your machine. After that comes the post TJ told me I have to write. About 80% of my workers now run on Codex, and it barely touches my usage. I'll show how I track model and effort spend every week, and why most of the credit goes to how I plan the work.
On the Avocet side, the posts get technical. Building a meeting recorder turned up problems I didn't expect. There's a reason Avocet never collapses your voiceprints into a single average. A macOS audio tap reports a sample rate it doesn't deliver at. Trust it, and a Bluetooth headset gives you a track exactly half as long as the call. And at one point, thanks to Krisp, Avocet decided my own voice was a second person on the call.
Avocet beta invites go out soon too. The usual sections, links and the dev tool of the week, come back once I'm in a rhythm again.
That's it for this week. Hit reply and tell me which post you want first. And if you try Hive, Lookover, or Jig, I'd love to hear what breaks.
– Chris