Mindwired

I can never remember when I last changed the water in my aquarium. Was it last Saturday, or the one before? It always feels recent, and then it turns out it has been much longer. This is the tank: an angelfish, a few mollies, a big piece of driftwood and a lot of live plants. It is not a hard tank to keep. It mostly needs one thing from me, regular water changes, and that is exactly the thing I keep losing track of. Why it is so easy to forget The tank does not tell you when it is due. The water looks clear and the fish look happy for a long time after a change should have happened. There is no moment that reminds me, like an empty fridge or a full bin. A water change is also not a daily habit. It happens every week or two, which is the worst rhythm for memory. Daily things become automatic, and monthly things go in the calendar. Something in between just blurs: every weekend looks the same, so "last weekend" could mean any of them. What I tried before I tried writing th...

I have been using Claude for something a bit different from my usual coding: designing physical parts to 3D print. The trick that makes it work is OpenSCAD. Why OpenSCAD fits an AI so well OpenSCAD is CAD written as code. Instead of clicking and dragging, you describe a part as shapes that are added together and cut from each other, and every dimension is a named variable. To a language model that is just a text file, so it can read the whole design, reason about it and change it precisely. My setup is simple: Claude Code runs in the terminal and edits the .scad file, while OpenSCAD has the same file open with automatic reload. Every time Claude saves, the 3D preview updates in front of me, so I watch the part take shape in real time. How the conversation goes I give it measurements, photos and what the part has to do. Claude writes a parametric model with comments explaining each value. I look at the preview and say what is wrong in plain words: "the corners look easy to...