resources

A grab bag of things I use, read, and learn from. Not exhaustive. Not in any particular order. Updated when I remember to.

AI tools and models

• Mavis / MCode CLI — the M3 model. Cheap, terse, good for the boring 80%.
• Claude — the model I use for bug hunts and the multi-file reasoning work.
• Codex CLI — OpenAI's terminal agent. Good for the small mechanical edits.
• Ollama — the local LLM server I run on the Proxmox GPU passthrough. Hosts the morning agent and the RAG.
• BGE embeddings — the embedding model used by my RAG. Runs locally, no API bill.

Proxmox and homelab

• Proxmox VE — the virtualization platform. Free, open source, runs my closet cluster.
• Proxmox Backup Server — the backup target. Verifies every backup, has dedup, runs on a fourth N100 node.
• MikroTik — the switches and APs. Cheap, VLAN-aware, no licensing.
• pfSense — the home router/firewall. Configuration in Terraform, in git.
• Proxmox helper scripts — the community-maintained one-shot installers for common VMs and containers. The closest thing Proxmox has to an app store.

Code editor and shell

• Neovim — the editor. Lua config, LSP, treesitter, telescope. The plugins list is short.
• Alacritty — the terminal emulator. GPU-rendered, fast, no features I don't use.
• tmux — the session manager. Two panes: one for the agent, one for the editor.
• fzf — fuzzy-finding everything: files, history, branches, processes.
• ripgrep — the only way to search a codebase.
• lazygit — the git TUI. Where I review and commit the agent's diffs.

Repos of mine

• texas-septic-toolkit — the Python tools and reference guides I maintain for my relative's install business. Tank sizer, drainfield calculator, perc logger, permit checklist, cost estimator, maintenance scheduler, soil lookup. This is the SEO surface for the business. The blog isn't.
• github.com/TexasSepticEnthusiast — the rest of the repos. Smaller stuff. The forks of the toolkit repo, plus a few one-off tools.

People and sites I read

• Hacker News — the daily check. Best signal-to-noise ratio of any tech site.
• LWN — the Linux weekly. The deep technical reporting on the kernel, the distros, the standards.
• Proxmox blog — release notes, in-depth feature posts, real-world use cases.
• Tailscale blog — the reference for what a good developer-facing networking company should look like.

Disclaimers

None of the links above are affiliate links. None of them are paid placements. I link to things I use, and I use things because they work, not because anyone asked me to. If a recommendation goes stale, file an issue on the blog repo and I'll update it.