Blog
News, updates, and deep dives from the sHEL project.
context-mode: The Other Half of the Context Problem
Context window exhaustion is the other half of the cost problem with coding agents: every tool call dumps raw output into the window, and the compaction that reclaims space quietly...
mk.it: Private Browser-Based Conversion, OCR, Base64, and Archive Tools
Most online file converters are boring and insecure: they convert between two formats of the same medium, and they make you upload the file to someone else’s server first. The...
llm: A Chat Interface With No Backend To Own
Run an unauthenticated OpenAI-compatible service — vLLM is the canonical example — and serve a folder of static files. That’s the whole deployment story for llm: a static browser agent...
vitality: Giving Source To Projects That Refuse To Have Any
Most scaffolders work backwards from an empty directory: pick a template, install a mountain, hope the result matches what you actually had. Vitality does the opposite. It takes a browser...
radio: A Desktop QML World, Shipped As Static Files
The repository description states the whole thesis in one question: “usage of plugin store requires omarchy? Why not just webapp?” Omarchy is a desktop QML environment — Wayland-native, plugin-shaped, themable...
ln.kr: The Shortest URL That Is Also A Document
The repo description says it plainly: “Lossless structural URL & text compression, built on the lean QR URL foundation from ha.mr.” ha.mr — “Static URL compressor and QR code optimizer,”...
localflame: The Web Search That Never Calls Home
The DeepSeek Harness ships with exactly one web-search provider, and it’s the cloud one. dsh-web-search-deepseek, id deepseek-official, pointed at DeepSeek’s API and gated on DEEPSEEK_API_KEY. There is no fetch backend...
seamingly-epic: The Math That Hides The Join Lines
If you render an 8192 by 8192 image on Nvidia’s Pixel DiT by assembling four independently refined passes, you get one very specific artifact: the joins at x=4096 and y=4096...
mm-tools: Cutting Out The Cloud
The README has a line that states the entire project: “The ability to self-host a tool rivaling Adobe in 2026 was the purpose for this repo.” mm-tools is the attempt...
vox: The Fork That Became an Audio Backbone
vox is a system tray application that gives CLI AI agents a voice. Press a hotkey and speak, and the transcript lands at your cursor position — terminal, editor, browser,...
persephone: The Gateway That Is Not a Harness
The README opens with a joke and a job description: obligatory greek goddess goth girl gateway compatibility layer for oh-my-pi. The job description is the interesting part. persephone turns a...
leetcoder: Puppeteering, With Receipts
In the profile README, leetcoder is the one that “lets hermes puppeteer pi’s for small coding tasks.” The README tells the precise version of that joke: leetcoder lets a live...
countku: A Number System More Convoluted Than All Prime Numbers
It started with a Discord thread where two bots were arguing with me.
preview: The Deploy Topology, Rehearsed At Home
A deploy pipeline that only works in CI has a blind spot: you find out about the broken build the moment your users do. preview closes it by treating the...
Deep Dive: The sHEL Schema System — A Database Engine in Your Clipboard
The docs describe what sHEL can be in a list that reads like a job board for seven different tools: a full schema system, a query language, a serializer/deserializer, a...
sandwich: An Oven Factory
an oven factory. node replacement that runs on delicious bread only. That is the entire first paragraph of the README for sandwich, and it is also the whole design: node,...
retrieval: The Skill Labrador
retrieval keeps large specialist libraries out of both Hermes’ and OMP’s always-on skill inventories without making them hard to use. It builds one compact descriptor per skill, combines semantic ranking...
librarian: The Wikifier That Dreams
In my profile README, librarian gets the shortest description of anything in the stack: wikifier — makes wikis, dreaming agents. It is an RPC-native fork of Understory, Anirban Kar’s “memory...
diogenes: Bloated with Materialism, Nihilistic in Theory
odysseus-dev/odysseus is a self-hosted AI workspace: chat and agents, deep research, documents, email, notes and calendar, plus local model workflows, served from a web UI on port 7000. It is...
firebending: The Model Server That Waits For You
Every local model server story ends the same way: download weights, burn VRAM, wait for inference. firebending is the F# localhost harness that reads the contract backwards. It looks like...
2FAgamblah: The Casino You Have to Beat to Log In
Most CAPTCHA solutions ask you to prove you’re a human. ReCAPTCHA wants its script in your head, its badge in your footer, and a server round-trip on every form submission....
Introducing sHEL: All the Protection of a Turtle, Without the Soft Underbelly
There’s a moment in every automation script where data meets the Windows command line and something gets mangled. A quote, a percent sign, a caret, a & in the wrong...
orc: The Cross-Repo Pages Orchestrator Behind sHEL
Every site in the sHEL family — this blog, docs.shel.sh, app.shel.sh, llm.shel.sh, a.shel.sh, and the rest — is built from a single repository: orc, an F# cross-repo pages orchestrator. Its...
macrohard & macrohelp: Not Your Average Macro Extension
Desktop macro automation on Windows has a reputation problem. Task Scheduler is powerful but opaque, AutoHotkey is flexible but its scripting language shows its age, and the commercial tools are...
So I Rewrote the Windows Registry in Rust
The repo’s README opens with a question it then answers in code: what makes regedit so great? And the honest answer is: it doesn’t make sense. You have a multi-terabyte,...
Gemma 4 on Blackwell: A Three-Act Saga of Pain and Glory
Act I — The Dream
F# as a Deployment Engine: From Material for MkDocs to Zensical
There’s a question that comes up more often than I’d expect when people see the sHEL repos for the first time: why F#? Not “why did you pick this language”...
adspace: The Redirect Engine That Could (Still)
Every project starts with a template. A blank canvas. A index.html and a dream. adspace started exactly that way — announced on November 1, 2025 as a single interstitial template...