A biweekly newsletter

Raising Agents

Raising a child during the agent revolution. Raising agents during a child revolution. Both are going fine. Neither is going fine.

This site has a live dashboard of its author's own metrics, a 20-second diagnostic you can take right now, a biweekly essay, and a small free tool at the bottom. You deserve to know the trade.

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hours slept last night — open sessions — closet-hours tax (this week) — tokens burned (this month) — kept MRR — last pulse —

The closet-hours diagnostic

Three questions. Twenty seconds. Find out if you are currently over-building. Answers live in your browser only — nothing is sent anywhere.

Answer honestly. The test is brutal by design.

Question 1 of 3

Is what you are building right now due this week?

Question 2 of 3

Would a reasonable adult stop right now if they were tired?

Question 3 of 3

Does finishing the next step feel like relief, or like wanting to start the step after?

Verdict

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Get the full tool → Take it again

What this is

A biweekly field log from a senior AI consultant becoming a father during the agent revolution. Before paternity leave, I am cloning myself — not uploading my consciousness (which I would probably do if offered), but building agents, writing prompts, and tuning systems so my colleagues can ask "what would Adrian do" during the six weeks I am out, without having to find out.

The newsletter is about that. What I build. What it costs. What breaks. How tired I am. What my son does that no system in the world can handle.

It is not a newsletter about how AI will help us all. There are many of those. This is not one of them.

The voice

Anti-hero. Deadpan. Dry. Honest. Occasionally fragile. The reference stack is Murderbot, Matt Levine's Money Stuff, Nora Ephron's personal essays, David Sedaris.

The factual opening. Start with a specific, concrete fact. A time, a number, a sentence of pure description. No throat-clearing.

The parenthetical correction. Say something, then immediately correct it. The correction is the real content.

The self-incrimination. Admit the thing you are not supposed to admit. Don't resolve it. Leave it sitting there.

The tiredness stat. Quantify your state. Specific, slightly absurd, honest.

The un-optimistic close. End on a flat fact. Never a key takeaway. Never "stay tuned."

Rules I will not break

My son's real name is never used. He is referred to plainly as my son. No codename, no nickname — just the relationship.
My wife is never named, never quoted, never given words she did not say. She is a presence on the page, not a character. When she appears, she is "my wife" (in scenes where the point is a promise made to her) or "the other parent" (in everything else). She is almost always the competent one.
Colleagues are never named individually.
Clients are never identifiable.
No direct quotes from any family member, ever.
Numbers — hours slept, euros earned, subscribers, tokens — are always real. If a number is private, the line is omitted rather than faked.

latest episode · April 2026

Facing the closet

"It is 8pm. My son is in the other room with the other parent. He is, as far as I can tell from here, winning. I am in this room, in front of a screen, Claude-coding. I am, in the honest sense of the word, hiding."

Introduces closet hours: the hours you spend on builds nobody is waiting for. Three-question diagnostic above. Full episode on its own page.

Read the full episode →

What else is on this site

The newsletter is biweekly, but the site is always on. Four places worth visiting:

Archive →
Every episode, published and queued. Organized by axis: self / agents / relationships.
Tools →
Claude Code skills, MCP servers, agents, hooks I run. Free artifacts, paid archive, and products when they ship.
Sandbox →
Try the diagnostics, fire a pulse, chat with the clone (from 11 May), submit to the distribution. Nothing installed, nothing tracked.
Adrian →
The public profile. Every orchestration test I have taken, verdicts, trends. A growing catalog of failure modes.
Changelog of Me →
Twenty years of path — film → eLearning → innovation → AI — rendered as an append-only log. Six aborted degrees. Working since fourteen.