Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Lately, I’ve been using Claude pretty heavily more than other LLMs. Over time, I’ve accumulated settings, plugins, and various configurations that I don’t want to lose. If I ever set up a new machine, I want to be able to restore those settings without rebuilding everything from scratch.
So I set up a backup system using rclone and Google Drive (though you can use any cloud provider of your choice with rclone).
A few months ago I shipped the first version of BurnRate (and another version after that). It’s a macOS menu bar app that showed your Claude Code usage limits at a glance.
It solved a real problem: I didn’t want to stop what I was doing to type /usage every time I wondered how close I was to hitting my limits.
But Claude Code solved it better.
The first version of Now Playing Notify was primarily focus on notifications for the currently playing track. The second release was about being able to do something with them such as being able to click to open a track, copy a link, and launch at login.
This release is focused more on optimizing several things behind the scenes. As such, most of what’s in 1.2.0 is invisible.
Where Can I Watch? 1.3.0 is out, and this one is less about new features and more about making controls that have been in the app since launch easier to find and easier to trust.
When 1.2.0 shipped, I wrote that 1.3.0 was going to be a detail-page overhaul. But the more I used the app, the more I noticed another set of issues specifically around the filtering controls in the Services tab. They’ve been there since 1.0.0, but they’re buried far too low beneath the list of streaming service providers. So I shifted gears. The detail-page work moved to 1.4.0, and 1.3.0 became a clarity pass on the filtering experience across Search and Trending.
If you spend any meaningful amount of time working with Claude Code, you’ll eventually hit a familiar wall: you open a conversation, ask it to do something, and it starts poking around your project like it’s never been there before.
Because it hasn’t. Every conversation starts fresh.
That’s fine for small projects. But when you’re working across a monorepo with a dozen cloud functions, shared utilities, and deployment scripts, watching Claude re-explore the same directory tree for the fifth time in yet-another-worktree in a single day, it gets old (and expensive, as far as tokens are concerned).
So I built /onboard. It’s a Claude Code skill that scans the current working directory, builds a structured summary of the codebase, and caches it so future conversations can skip the discovery phase entirely.
It started life as a slash command called /ingest, but I’ve since ported it to a proper skill with smarter defaults and a key-files-first approach that keeps token costs down.
Granted, it’s very much experimental right now (so much so I’m documenting the process of evaluating it).
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