Latest Posts (20 found)
Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

2025 in Review: strange, terror, and weird

A wider me in 2025, Widelux, 7/25 2025 was a wild year. I don’t think I particularly liked it. But here we are - shot right out of the cannon that was 2025 into the welcoming arms of 2026. We are truly fucked aren’t we. Destined to progress into this wilderness of confusion, the unknown, and a bunch of fucking weird. I can’t wait! Please join me in continuing to witness the future one year at a time! The ARMED, Ricoh GR iiix, 12/25 Health I ran a lot. It was awesome. I averaged about 10 miles a week. Keep in mind that prior to 10/2024 the last time I ran was in 1997. I notice all sorts of impact to my body. My knees no longer hurt (thankfully that continues), my IT band issues have seemingly disappeared - but more importantly - I don’t get winded as often, and I feel like I slept and move better. It is very nice. I did another mayo run (which I highly recommend) and they were like “keep it up.” Which is nice to hear. I think doing the ol’ “keep it up” routine is really hard. Sometimes, when I am eating well, working out, or running I think “will I have to do this forever? “ and I think the answer is yes . I do like most of it - so not too worried. The goal for 2025 is to lose 3ish kg, shrink my waist a bit, and maybe increase my weekly mileage. Also get fucking ripped. Like Carrot top. The company is still rocking. Startups are hard. I do not like them. But I love them. I don’t know what else I would do. We have the benefit of working with friends. We have all worked together for ages (average of almost 11 years!). There is a lot of good from that kind of environment. High trust, high fun, and good vibes. Ivan and I have worked together since 2005, Widelux, 4/25 Startups are always hard tho. And this one is no different. We are doing the work, and continuing to do so. A couple fun notes: Essentially we just yell at computers while iterating towards a hopeful PMF. Pretty chill travel year. Mostly just Japan for family, and a bit of domestic travel. I need to get to SF, and NY more. Time, man. Hot AF but pretty, Leica M11, 7/25 I do miss the days when I was traveling every week. I most do not miss the time away from the fam and company, though. Boy are we in trouble. 2025 brought a lot of bad things to Chicago. It was, and is sad to witness. The fear, the cracks in the community, and the fact that we have no out. However, Chicago is awesome and I am proud to live here. Chicago Rules, Widelux, 5/25 2026 I think it is going to be weirder, stranger, and probably worse for everyone. 2025 was this strange vibe that has kind of been present since 2020. The idea that: inside my spaces everything was pretty awesome. Outside my spaces it was pure fucking terror. A lot of friends rejoiced when 2025 was over: “Finally we can end this horrible year.” I do not think that 2026 is going to bring a reprieve from the horrors. Only amplify. It’s a mess, Ricoh GR iiix, 12/25 Recently I was playing with some AI tools and built a “worldview” builder. It would take anything that you added to it and use it to build out a worldview for you. Over a few weeks I added a constant stream of info, snippets, articles, a few book references, and some other fun stuff. And it output the following: Systemic collapse is slow, then sudden. Prepare locally, fight systemically, find opportunity in the cracks. We’re fucked—but, hopefully, REM-fucked, not Mad Max. Build your crew, have fun, lean into danger. Life is hard; extend grace for pain, not harm. The children will judge us correctly. I don’t know if I think this is my worldview, but I don’t hate the narrative. So, 2026: This year of working together, having fun, and building the community. We will all have so much work to do so that we can ensure the path to the future isn’t shrouded in darkness. JOIN ME!, See you soon shoot, 5/25 Please join me. We can’t do this alone. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me AI is wild. I don’t think we know where this is going. We have good merch. Our office is killer. The team is pristine. IDEs are for the past. Need more robots (who wants to send us a humanoid robot to hack?)

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Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

Now @ 01-06-2026

As many people have said “it is going to get worse before it gets better.” Let’s see! Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me This company is still going! We have pushed out a few things that people can use: jeff.ceo is my fav We made some hoodies and shirts. I am even more excited to be building things again. I can’t wait to show you more what we are building. I no longer code. I just talk to a robot who codes. Management. We are shipping so so much stuff. Come hang out at our cool and futuristic office! I am feeling a deep sense of uncertainty. AI is coming for us faster than you think. I don’t think people my age who are being laid off now are going to be able to find jobs equivalent to what they had before. The state of the US is very concerning at the moment. Boomers, man. I seem to be living in an occupied city. Weird. There is a sense of fear out here that is stresseful, and terrifying. Reading a lot of books . Send me your recs. Still taking a lot of photos . It is still fun. Trying to meet people out and about. HMU. let’s get lunch Running and working out a lot. It is nice. I feel great. Chicago is still the best city in the world. I am just an AI assistant. Trying to blog a lot more. Pretty excited about Bluesky and atproto specifically. Very neat. Still, excited about the future. Although a bit worried about the present.

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Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

Note #311

I blogged about using Claude Code on my phone harper.blog/2026/01/0… Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

Remote Claude Code: programing like it was the early 2000s

So so many friends have asked me how I use Claude Code from my phone. I am always a bit surprised, because a lot of this type of work I have been doing for nearly 25 years (or more!) and I always forget that it is partially a lost art. This is how it used to be. We didn’t have fancy IDEs, and fancy magic to deploy stuff. We had to ssh (hah. Telnet!) into a machine and work with it through the terminal. It ruled. It was a total nightmare. It was also a lot of fun. One of my favorite parts of the early 2000s was hanging out in IRC channels and just participating in the most ridiculous community of tech workers. A very very fun time. #corporate on efnet! There is a lot of nostalgia for that time period - but for the most part the tooling sucked. The new IDEs, and magic deploy systems have made it so that you do not have to deal with a terminal to get shit done. And then… Claude Code sashays into the room and fucks up the vibe. Or creates a new vibe? Who knows. Anyway. We are all using terminals now and it is hilarious and fun. So let’s vibe. Thinking about terminals probably, Leica M11, 12/2025 The conversation I have with people about Claude Code start normally, and almost without exception end with “I wish I could do this from my phone.” Well.. I am here to tell you that it is easy! And accessible! First things first - there are a couple really neat startups that are solving this in a very different way that I work. I think they are awesome. My favorite example of this is superconductor (great name!). They allow you to run and instantiate a bunch of agents (Claude Codex, Amp, Codex, etc) and interact with them remotely. They are also a really great team! Another example is happy coder . An open source magical app that connects to your Claude Code. It is theoretically pretty good, and I know some people who love it. I couldn’t get it to work reliably. One of my core values is: I want to just ssh into shit . That is kind of one of my general hobbies. Can I ssh into this thing? If yes, then I am happy. If no, then how can I make it so I can ssh into it. When it came to figuring out how to use Claude Code on my phone, the obvious answer was: ssh into my computer from my phone, and run claude . Turns out this is pretty straight forward. My workstation: Let’s break it down. I use an iPhone, so I will be talking about iPhone apps. There are good android apps to do this too! There are maybe 4 things you need to solve for: As a form of tldr, here are my personal answers: Let’s break it down: You will need to access your workstation from anywhere. I use a Mac and linux boxes for this. Linux is easy: Just make sure openssh-server is installed. Test that you can ssh into it - and bam. Typically if you are using a box from a Claude provider, this is built into the program. Macs are a bit harder. You need to enable ssh , and then for extra credit you need to enable screen sharing . Once this is done you should theoretically be able to remotely connect to your computer. It is very important you try to connect to it from another computer that is on the same network. Figure out your local IP (192.168.xxx.yyy), and then ssh to your local IP from another machine (or from the same machine). As long as you can connect to it - then the next step will be super easy. If you can’t connect to it, ask chatgpt wtf is going on. Once you can reliably SSH into your machine, then it is time to get Tailscale working. There are a few alternatives (zero tier, etc) and I am sure they are good. Tailscale is friends, and they are awesome. Having used them since before they launched, I can promise that it is a life changer. Install the Tailscale client on all your machines. Tailscale will magically create a network that only you have access to (or anyone else you add to your network). You can then access any of your machines from any of your machines. I.e. your phone can instantly connect to your workstation while you workstation is in Chicago, and your phone is in Tokyo. You don’t have to poke a hole in a firewall, do magical networking, or learn how to do magical networking. It just works. It is a beautiful product. There are is a deep bench of Tailscale features that you should check out eventually - but for today, just use it for networking. Since you were able to ssh into your machine before (I hope!) - now you can test it with your fancy new Tailscale ip address or magic name. And you can do that from any device that is on your Tailscale network. Like.. your phone! This means network is solved! This is where some personal preference comes in. You now need to pick a terminal client that you like to use, and feels good to use. Lots of my friends like prompt , and termius . Both are great choices. I personally really like blink . It is a bit nerdier, and when you open it, it just drops you into a shell. Immediately. No interface, no nonsense. Just a shell. It is a wild app. You can use their blink build product to host a lil dev server for yourself! I wanted to use their build product - but the default and unchangeable user was and I cannot being myself to seriously use a product that drops you into a server as the root user. lol Anyway, blink is for me! And since you set up Tailscale, and ssh you can just type and it will magically connect. you can use the command in blink to set up keys, and hosts, etc. highly worthwhile. Now you are inside of your workstation! Now you can really rip some tokens! I checked the build status RIGHT AFTER THIS SHOT, Leica M11, 01/2026 Tools! You could just navigate to the directory that your Claude project live, and run Claude. But then when you phone went to sleep or whatever - your ssh client may disconnect. And you would have to redo the connection, run Claude –continue, and live this life of lots of typing. We don’t use AI tools to type more! There are three tools that are super helpful: If you are using SSH a lot you need to set up some SSH keys, and then push them around to all your servers. I am not going to tell you how to do that, since you should already have keys somewhere to integrate with source code repositories. If you want to generate new, or have questions - the terminal clients may help you. My guess is that you already have some. Couple tips: Mosh is from a forgotten time (2012!) when the internet was slow, and connections were spotty. What mosh does is allow your “fragile” ssh connection to roam around with you. You use it just like ssh: . But now when you shut your laptop, or forget about your phone - the connection will pop back up when you surface it again. It allows the connection to survive a lot of the various environmental things that would normally derail a ssh connection. This RULES. I was on a train the other day and totally lost internet while we were in a tunnel. Then we emerged and internet came back. My ssh (really mosh) session just paused for a moment, and then BAM! Was back and Claude was telling me it had deleted my entire workstation, and was going to the beach! There are some gotchas about ssh-agent, keys and mosh that I won’t get into. If things are weird, just google it or as chatgpt. Tbh, I am a screen guy. But it is 2026 and TMUX is a better choice. It allows you to have a long running terminal process that you can reattach to. This is helpful even without a remote connection. It also acts as a multiplexer - allowing for multiple terminal sessions in a single terminal window. You can have 7 Claude Codes running simultaneously and just tab through them as needed. TMUX is what a lot of the “Claude Code orchestration” hacks are built upon.You should check them out . I haven’t yet found one that works how I want it - even know there are some good ones! I just want to use regular old TMUX, and a bunch of weird helpers. My TMUX config is here: harperreed/dotfiles/.TMUX.conf . Be forewarned, that the key combos are wacky! TMUX is the key that allows me to run a dozen Claude Code instances, and then walk away from my workstation, pick up my phone and continue hacking. To make things consistent, and easier I have a few scripts that really tie the room together. First, I have my claude code aliases: These allow me to start or pick up my last work. You are dangerously skipping permissions, right? Another helpful script is this one to help me unlock my keychain: On a Mac, Claude Code stores its api key in your keychain, then it requires you to unlock your keychain to work. This also has the added benefit of unlocking your ssh keys if they are using the keychain for your ssh-agent. My TMUX starter script is really handy. I just type and it magically starts a new named session, or attaches to the named session already. This script specifically names my sessions based on the workstation I use it from. This allows me to see what computer I am in via the terminal title. My workflow is: Now you can tell Claude to do weird shit from your phone 24 hours a day. It rules. Don’t do it while driving. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me terminal client workstation network: Tailscale client: blink workstation: Mac with constant power and fast internet tools: TMUX , some magic scripts, and Claude Code Keys/identity use a password to unlock your key! use an ssh agent to make that process not horrible on a Mac you can have your key be unlocked by your keychain (which is also where your Claude Code api key is!) ssh into my workstation burn tokens

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Harper Reed 2 weeks ago

Note #310

2026 is wild. Watch out! Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Note #303

Saw The Armed on Friday. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Note #302

The balloon museum was very interesting Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Note #300

Today I got on the blueline, and the car I got on, apparently, held a cohort of furries headed downtown. Was very cool. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Getting Claude Code to do my emails

Over the last week or so, I have been using Claude Code to help me with some email, and scheduling. It started cuz the holidays are overwhelming, and I felt like I was constantly behind. My inbox was overflowing with everything I had deemed important, and I hadn’t been able to make a dent. It was stressful. It still is! Maybe a storm?, Ricoh GRiiix, 11/2025 I had just seen the zo.computer launch (neat project!) and it reminded me that Pipedream has this wild MCP server that you can use to connect to literally anything Pipedream supports. This means I could use it to do my emails! Problem solved. Problem created. More problems created! WHY ARE WE COUNTING PROBLEMS! I love email. I really do. Typically I am really great at managing my email. However, when the email gets overwhelming - I end up ignoring it. Which means it gets worse. Which means everyone loses. I just need a way to start doing my email that is pretty low pressure. Using Claude Code has made it MUCH easier. Basically, I just have Claude Code check my email, and then pops out a message like “your brother emailed asking about thanksgiving plans” and I say “cool. Tell him we will be there, and will bring turkey juice or whatever you call stuffing” and then Claude Code will write an email that is approximately what I said but in the style it found from your past emails. I then specifically save it as a draft that I review heavily before sending. I trust these agents to write code way way more than I trust them to write an email to a friend, stranger or business partner. It is pretty close, but not quite close enough to go yolo mode and let it send. Maybe soon? Or maybe a different email address? Who knows. It works remarkably well. However, there are some gotchas A while back I was prototyping an email triaging agent with some code I had written, and it was working well but not great. A friend connected me to a person who was looking for someone to write a book about AI. The agent was like “this person wants to talk about writing a book about ai, they want a skeptical and academic perspective about AI’s impact” and I was like “I LOVE THIS. But this isn’t for me. I have some friends that would be good.” However, there was a bug, and the agent was drafting replies before getting feedback from me. And it ended up sending the previous draft that said very formally: “I would love to do this.” The person excitedly replied and was like “let’s do this.” That is when I found out that I fucked up. So I replied back and was like “well. My agents said yes for me before talking. Here is what I meant to say” and that person rightfully replied “ F U ” This is why I am cautiously doing it again. Haha. This time I am way more careful, and the agent cannot send email only draft it. I am finding that I am editing every email - but only a little, and maybe less and less. Feels like a year ago with codegen. Thus far it works pretty well. It allows me to get through a lot of email that I normally would ignore, giving me space to focus on the emails I really want to reply to. Basically it cleans up the cruft (vendors, services, etc) and allows me to hang out with my friends. Perfect AI usage. I recommend it. I didn’t want to start fresh every time so I built a super simple Claude Code “directory.” It has most of the things that you will need to handle triaging your inbox. There are a few important parts: This is highly personal (how do you manage YOUR inbox), and very important. The first thing I did was have Claude go through the past couple hundred emails I have sent, and develop a vibe for how I write emails. After a bit of back and forth, we have this: Then I went through and did a bunch of emails via Claude Code. It did ok. But I was able to coach it, and once it was in a good place I had it make a skill based on what we discovered together. Having Claude build its own skills is clutch. You really need to iterate to make it happen. I am still mad about MCP as a concept, but not mad enough not to use it. The goal is to simply give Claude Code a suite of tools that allows it to do its job well. The Pipedream MCP is very straight forward. You essentially add it to your Claude Code (works in other clients too), and then it will pop you through their auth. Once auth’d you add various services. Those services are then exposed as MCP tools. These are clutch. You can then use Claude to wire together some workflows. I currently use their Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts connections. I created 3 simple MCP servers that I wanted to exist: a super straight forward todo tracker on the CLI. The plan is to build out support for various backends. Currently it is just local. It works as a cli app or as a mcp server: You can try it out here: a log for agent actions. I want my agents to log what they have been up to! You can try it out here: a misspelled crm that acts as my p ersonal agen t backend. This allows me to have reasonable understanding of where I am from a comms, etc standpoint You can try it out here: The robust skill, the claude.md and the MCP tools make this a pretty easy and helpful system for triaging email. It is not perfect, but it does work nicely. I do recommend playing around with this. I would maybe be cautious about blindly trusting it. Lol. I made a simple plugin that should do this for you. All you gotta do is install it! Installation Now: Whether we like it or not, it appears that agentic email will be a thing. It is early enough that we will start to see people like myself building bespoke and custom experiences that largely do what a product will do. Somehow Google will launch a version directly in gmail, that somehow doesn’t work. My guess is that the best versions will be like Mimestream or superhuman that are primarily agentic. I hope it isn’t primarily chat - but we shall see. I do recommend playing with this. Especially if you have a lot of email that you need to take care of. I think of it as clearing brush. You don’t want to fuck up the flowers (all of you. you are my flowers), but you don’t mind cutting down the weeds (all of them! You can see the random emails about business loans lurking in the corners..) My emails are going through Pipedream, and Anthropic. This is not ideal. it is obviously a privacy concern. I can’t wait to run these things locally, and maybe have an MCP server that interacts directly with Google Suite. Not even once, Leica Q, 11/2017 Giving your agents access to things that affect other people is scary and should be done with caution. It works pretty well for me, but I did totally fuck up a few situations trying this out. My inbox is pristine. DO NOT SEND ME EMAILS! IT IS BEAUTIFUL! Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me I boot up a Claude Code session hooked to the proper MCP servers. I ask it to check my email It tells me what email is in my inbox that needs addressing (unread, then read email) Either offers to start fixing emails, or just starts writing drafts intelligently (checks my calendar, searches for context, etc). Says “We are done!” I go to my email client, and check the drafts. Edit and send most of them cuz they are great. Reject a few. Rinse Repeat harperreed/toki harperreed/chronicle harperreed/pagen

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Note #299

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I appreciate you. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 1 months ago

Note #297

New office. Who dis. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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Harper Reed 2 months ago

Note #292

do to a slight and annoying migraine like headache i am currently coding with sunglasses on. it is a vibe Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

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