Archive - As The Geek Learns

I Got Tired of Paying for Substack Notes Schedulers, So I Built My Own

I learned how to build a Substack Notes scheduler by reverse engineering their undocumented API. Covers architecture decisions, TOS compliance, and tech…

Jan 13 • James Cruce

I Gave My AI Agent Hands. It Immediately Started Texting My Wife.

My local AI agent, Tars, could talk.

Mar 24 • James Cruce

Database Schema Design Mistake That Broke My App

How real-world usage revealed a fundamental flaw in my database design

Jan 9 • James Cruce

I Built My Own Notion With Claude Fable 5 — In One Session

I gave Claude Fable 5 one prompt and by end of day I had a full Notion-style macOS app — block editor, databases, an auto-scheduling calendar, and an AI…

Jun 11 • James Cruce

I Gave My Mac Studio an AI OpenClaw Brain Upgrade. Here’s Every Wall I Hit.

Replacing Notion with a self-hosted AI agent running on a Mac Studio. Today I actually did it. The install took six hours, not the two I planned

Mar 9 • James Cruce

I’m Replacing Notion With a Self-Hosted AI Agent. Here’s Why.

Today I’m starting a project I’ve been thinking about for weeks: ripping Notion out of my workflow and replacing it with OpenClaw, a self-hosted AI…

Mar 6 • James Cruce

Local LLMs Plus Claude Code: The Mac Studio Hybrid Workflow

Route generation to local Ollama models (gemma4, qwen3-coder) and save Claude for judgment calls. The routing table I run on a 256GB M3 Ultra Mac…

Jun 23 • James Cruce

The Ironclad Workflow That Prevents Technical Debt

Ironclad Workflow

Feb 4 • James Cruce

Cortex: An Event-Sourced Memory Architecture for AI Coding Assistants

As The Geek Learns | Technical Deep Dive Author: James Cruce Date: February 2026

Feb 17 • James Cruce

How I Built JDex with Claude AI—A Systems Engineer's Honest Take

A systems engineer shares his experience building JDex, a Johnny Decimal index app, using Claude AI—including what AI collaboration actually looks like…

Dec 20, 2025 • James Cruce

I Killed OpenClaw and Built ClaudeClaw Mission Control

Retiring OpenClaw, migrating to ClaudeClaw Mission Control, and what five days of teardown taught me about operational blindness.

May 2 • James Cruce

I Had Files Scattered Across 4 Clouds. So I Built an App with AI to Fix It

Part 1: Why the Johnny Decimal file organization system finally clicked. A systems engineer with 25 years managing enterprise infrastructure finally…

Dec 11, 2025 • James Cruce

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