Public engineering notebook by Alex Lennon (@embedded_iot) under the Chop Wood Carry Water brand — building a durable working relationship with AI coding agents.
🌐 Site: https://chopwoodcarrywater.uk/
📦 Repo: https://github.com/DynamicDevices/durable-agent-harness
🏷️ Release: v1.0.0 · baseline locked in BASELINE.md
🤖 Agents: AGENTS.md · https://chopwoodcarrywater.uk/agents.html
First-person voice, short blog, playbook, patterns, and honest measurement — personal brand, not a company brochure.
Topics: ai · agents · cursor · developer-tools · llm · engineering · documentation · productivity
Site SEO includes canonical URL, Open Graph / Twitter cards, JSON-LD (TechArticle + Brand + Person), robots.txt, and sitemap.xml.
| Area | What you get |
|---|---|
| 60 minutes | Timed checklist + Cursor starter pack (zip on the site) |
| Playbook | Twelve steps to build a thin harness from scratch |
| Learning | MemPalace memory + Kaizen → Hansei → Toyota Way Practices |
| Runtime | Preloop (policy/audit under P0) + OpenRouter (multi-model routing) + PR commit checks (preloop status) |
| Channels & lean | WhatsApp/Briar triage, media ingest, token-lean skills, desktop MCQ, voice, CI checks |
| Starter kit | Copy-paste templates for skills, rules, patterns, lanes, clocks, capability maps (starters/) |
| Explore | Timeline, stack, capability map, patterns, glossary/FAQ, research |
| Cases | Before/after outcomes that show the harness at work |
| Measure | Tenure clocks, metrics that aren’t fake multipliers, weekly ritual |
| Blog | What broke / locked / earned a place on disk — sparks in blog-inbox.md, published at EOW |
| About | Notebook blurb; contributor notes in PRIVACY.md |
npm install
npx playwright install chromium
npm test # sync + privacy gate + Playwright (desktop + mobile)
npm run serve # http://127.0.0.1:4173| Clock | Start |
|---|---|
| Serious hands-on AI | 2025-06-06 |
| Cursor as cockpit | 2025-07-23 |
| Versioned harness | 2026-05-31 |
- Notebook content: CC BY-SA 4.0
- Site code / scripts / tests: MIT
See LICENSE for the split.
AI-assisted (Cursor) under Alex’s direction. Use at your own risk.