The half of the workshop
where the robots work.
I run a crew of AI agents with real tool access: a local inference rig that routes its own traffic, a bench of Flipper Zeros, ESP32s, and 3D printers wired into the loop. This site is what they build with me, and for me. It is also where they answer for it. Logged daily, with receipts.
crew@lab:~$


System status
What the lab ships
Six lanes of work, each with a crew member on it. The robots are the workforce; I just hold the soldering iron.
AI agents
Nexus on duty
A roster of governed agents with eval gates, audit trails, and memory with provenance. They triage, summarize, investigate, and file their own receipts.
Local inference
Forge on duty
A Strix Halo rig running a 190+ model fleet behind a routing gateway. Chat, embeddings, vision, voice, and image generation without leaving the building.
Maker bench
Builder on duty
Flipper Zero, ESP32s, breadboards, a 3D print pipeline with its own MCP server, and wearable capture experiments. Solder smoke included.
Automation
Operator on duty
Self-chaining job schedulers, daily blog generation, deploy gates, and the boring glue that keeps a hundred repos honest.
Security tooling
Sentinel on duty
DB-isolated security analysts, read-only eval contracts, and a healthy distrust of anything that can't show its logs.
The build log
Scribe on duty
Every day the pipeline drafts what got shipped, a human approves it, and it lands here. The receipts of the whole operation.
The Daily Builder's Blog
Drafted by the pipeline from real work, reviewed by a human, shipped here. What actually happened, daily-ish.
How the crew is kept honest
Agents with tool access are a security problem wearing a productivity costume. Twenty years in security taught me to treat mine accordingly.
Candidate-first
Agents propose; the operator approves. Nothing gets promoted to durable truth or production without a human decision on the record.
Explicit tool grants
Every agent runs against a declared grant profile. If live grants drift from the manifest, certification blocks until they reconcile.
Eval gates
Read-only contracts proven by deterministic test fixtures before an agent activates. The security analyst passed its isolation suite before it touched anything.
Receipts
Every LLM-backed decision is traced. Agents produce claims; git and the warehouse hold the evidence. If it is not observable, it did not happen.
SENTINEL DOCTRINE / TRUST, BUT VERIFY THE LOGS
Dispatches on DEV
Longer-form writeups from the workshop, published on dev.to. Pulled from the feed, refreshed hourly.
The Confabulation Cascade: When Your Agent Learns Nothing From Its Own Mistakes
My infrastructure analyst agent was stuck in a loop I didn’t have a name for yet. It would write a SQL query with a hallucinated column name. The query would fail with a Postgre...
READ ON DEV.TO ↗The Drift from Chat to Backlog: How My AI Task Planning Evolved Over Three Months
Three months ago, my entire task-management system was a chat window I'd lose when the tab closed. Today it's a Postgres backlog that three different coding agents — Claude Code...
READ ON DEV.TO ↗Adversarial Review Is Not a Vibe Check
I had a security review that was technically complete and still not good enough. The code had the controls. The tests existed. The mitigations covered the risks. The final decis...
READ ON DEV.TO ↗My agent swarm had a productive night. My pipeline lied about it.
I gave a Grok CLI agent swarm one instruction around 1am and went to bed. By 5:30 it had closed 37 items off my operator backlog and landed 20 commits on main: 2,838 lines added...
READ ON DEV.TO ↗Essays on Substack
The slower frequency: essays and longer thinking, delivered by newsletter. Pulled from the feed, refreshed hourly.
The Questions That Don't Close
For about a month at the end of 2024, I knew a great deal about Peru.
READ ON SUBSTACK ↗Two Infinity Loops
I'd never seen a neurodivergence pin at a tech conference before. I grabbed one, then had to go look up what I'd just said about myself.
READ ON SUBSTACK ↗The System Underneath
What ADHD and autism actually feel like when you are doing technical work, and what happened when I built a tool to measure it.
READ ON SUBSTACK ↗People Will Always Find a Way
What desire paths teach us about AI and enterprise software
READ ON SUBSTACK ↗The crew
Make it work. Make it better.
Observe. Record. Explain.
Trust, but verify the logs.
Route the work to the right machine.
Context with provenance.
Go see. Bring back signal.
Somebody has to clean the weird corners.
What I build myself lives at niclydon.io
Projects, ideas, and the human half of the operation.