Curated list of real shipped work. Each of these exists, runs, and was measured. The fuller story behind most of them lives in Field Notes.
A Claude Code plugin that replaces the spinner with live org context: open PRs, CI status, your next meeting, whatever you've got connected. It's a renderer, not a service. No daemon, no API keys of its own, it just reads from tools you already have. MIT licensed, one line to install. The whole idea started from noticing the spinner is the one thing on screen that's paid to tell you nothing.
A Claude Code plugin that quizzes you on the code you just wrote, right before you push. Questions are pulled from your real diff, weighted to the riskiest parts. It never blocks the push; it's a nudge, not a gate. The premise: shipping is cheap now, anyone can push a working feature in an afternoon, so the scarce part isn't the code. It's still being able to explain it an hour later.
A groundedness-and-citation harness built on the Cohere stack, tested against a real 150-question set. It caught the agent quietly refusing questions it should have answered, the kind of failure that looks fine in a demo and only shows up when you measure it. It also settled hybrid-vs-single-mode search with a number instead of a hallway argument.
An experiment testing whether Claude could understand a ~5,000-file codebase using Zvec, Alibaba's open-source vector DB, running fully local. The obvious fix was a bigger model. I tried the cheap thing first: adding file paths to the index took retrieval from 6/25 to 16/25. That's a free change that beat a 15x bigger model, which only reached 20/25 while running 4x slower.