Week Notes — May 18: The Week the Toolkit Earned Its Keep

What I shipped

Most of the week went into dom, the AI cost-cutting toolkit. The premise is simple: most coding tasks don’t need a $2 Opus call. Haiku at one cent does it, and a third of the time a local Ollama model does it for free. dom routes the task to the cheapest model that can actually do it. One curl command installs it into any project; an eval policy gates every change.

Three things landed this week:

1. Polyglot smoke matrix. Three full compose stacks proving the toolkit scaffolds any combination of UI × API × DB: React+Spring+H2, React+Python+H2, and Node+C#+Oracle+Ollama. Same Karate feature runs against all three and must return the literal string hello world end-to-end. Three different language runtimes, four database vendors, and one assertion. That’s a contract.

2. Edit-everywhere, today. As of an hour ago, every stack now has a working edit button — UI fires a PUT /hello, the API tier proxies to the AI tier, the AI tier detects edit intent via a deterministic regex (no LLM for the parse — too expensive, too unreliable), and the underlying DB row gets updated. The byte-exact hello world contract still passes for any non-edit input. Five files, three languages, one consistent pattern.

3. A @dom orchestrator agent with hard rules about what it routes versus what it doesn’t touch. It’s the front door for “how do I do X in dom?” and it doesn’t write code — that’s the next agent down the chain.

dom is going to underwrite everything I build for the next year. I’d rather spend a Saturday once than $200/mo on tokens forever.

What else moved

• @job got rebuilt. Scope cut to job-hunt only, outplacement and separation docs moved out, validated-only pipeline, dashboard cleanup. The agent was carrying too much; I trimmed it to the one thing it has to do.

• smartballz, my fantasy-football XGBoost project, got a silent-failure sweep — banned a class of broad-except handlers that were masking real DB errors as “bad credentials.” Also fixed two actual model bugs (Ohtani showing on waivers when he shouldn’t, mid-tier trade values flattening out). The kind of week where you stop and notice the model is wrong before the league does.

• nyx-crm got a CI shell-injection fix and a FastMCP server with 19 verification tools — branch protection, audit logs, AI-call routing, skill search, diff, prisma studio. Boring infrastructure week. Boring infrastructure is good.

If you’re keeping score: that’s four repos with substantive commits in seven days, all while running an active job search. The fact that I can do that is the toolkit doing its job.

The other layer

I’m between roles. Anyone who’s followed along knows that. Family stuff in the mix means I’m deliberate about fit right now — and “deliberate” doesn’t mean “slow,” it means I know exactly what I’m looking for and I won’t sign for less. Senior engineering roles where the AI work is real, the team is serious, the problem is hard. Not AI-strategy-document jobs.

My kid had a great week at his Challenger sports program — the league for kids of all abilities. Every week I’m reminded that the people who run those programs are doing harder work than most engineering teams I’ve been on, with a fraction of the resources, and they show up cheerful every Saturday. I think about that a lot.

What’s next

Two threads. On the engineering side: dom gets a release tag this week and I start dogfooding it across all the side projects — already doing that, but now with versioned install instructions. On the job-search side: several real conversations in motion. Not naming names; the right ones are good shape.

If you’re here from a posting or recruiter intro — what I write here is what I think.

More next week.