I build local-first tools. They run on your own machine, at a footprint you can measure, and they don't phone home.

Mostly Rust and Python on a CPU-only laptop, which turns out to be a useful constraint. It forces you to find out what things actually cost instead of assuming the hardware will cover for you.

_{Rust, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript. Win32 and Linux IPC, DSP, browser extensions. Everything here runs offline unless the whole point of it is a network.}

hidforge holds an exact click rate from 10 to roughly 10,000 per second and idles at 0% CPU. It learns whatever a button actually emits rather than assuming a button number, because side buttons don't arrive on a predictable channel and some never reach the OS at all.

AirLock strips API keys, passwords and PII out of text before it reaches an LLM. A CLI you can pipe or hang off a pre-commit hook, plus a browser extension that catches the paste itself. Entirely local, no network calls, which is rather the whole point of a tool for not leaking things.

fretwork is a playable guitar in a single HTML file. Six coupled digital waveguides in an AudioWorklet, no recorded samples anywhere. It opens in a browser, so it is the quickest thing here to try.

nowwatching puts whatever you are watching on your Discord profile: the show's own name, poster art and a live countdown. It reads the Windows media session, so there is nothing to enable per site. Discord animates a card's progress bar client-side and has no field that means stopped, so a paused bar cannot be frozen. It can only be put back where it belongs, which it now is every ten seconds. anicli-rpc does the same job for anime in a terminal, by sitting between ani-cli and mpv without patching either one.

AutoDelete puts a timer on the messages you send in Discord, per channel, per category or per server, with a live countdown and a keep button. Deleting is paced one message at a time and the timer only ever runs late, never early, because the failure everyone else ships is a burst of deletions that looks exactly like a bot.

Alife grows micro-organisms that learn to survive within their own lifetime, with no generational hand-waving, on a single CPU core. mochi is a cat that lives on your desktop, watches you work, and expects to be fed. Cadence is a to-do app built around the more interesting question: why you stop opening to-do apps.

Learning cybersecurity properly, rather than by tutorial.

Reading an unreasonable amount of Win32 documentation as a side effect of hidforge: Raw Input, HID report descriptors, and exactly how much a QueryPerformanceCounter spin loop costs you.

Local IPC, lately. Discord frames its messages with an 8-byte header, mpv speaks line-delimited JSON, and underneath both it is named pipes on Windows or Unix sockets on Linux, which are far less interchangeable than they look.

The Windows media session too, which hands you a title, a duration and a timeline for anything playing on the machine, and then quietly stops updating that timeline the moment the tab goes to the background. Two bugs traced back to reading that silence as a pause.