stather.ingA virtual CV and open lab journal: one person's AI journey from pairing with Cursor at work to training small language models from scratch on my own hardware.https://stather.ing/The lab grows uphttps://stather.ing/journey/2026-09-the-lab-grows-up/https://stather.ing/journey/2026-09-the-lab-grows-up/v5 lands, the fleet gets a worker library and a weekly fire drill, LiLM's factory is built in a week, and this site gets a hostile review before it goes live.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTVerify by attacking the gatehttps://stather.ing/lessons/verify-by-attacking-the-gate/https://stather.ing/lessons/verify-by-attacking-the-gate/Before trusting a gate, make it fail: tamper a byte, skip a stage, forge the evidence, and watch it refuse.Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTMeasure the endpoint, not the proxyhttps://stather.ing/lessons/measure-the-endpoint/https://stather.ing/lessons/measure-the-endpoint/Score the thing the reward scores, at the tier the reader cares about, because aggregates hide dissociation.Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTTemporal or it's a POChttps://stather.ing/lessons/temporal-or-poc/https://stather.ing/lessons/temporal-or-poc/If a run cannot survive the death of the session that started it, it is a proof of concept.Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTGate on invariants, not symptomshttps://stather.ing/lessons/gate-on-invariants/https://stather.ing/lessons/gate-on-invariants/Reject on a property the good output cannot violate, not on a list of failures you have seen before.Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTA green exit is not donehttps://stather.ing/lessons/green-exit-is-not-done/https://stather.ing/lessons/green-exit-is-not-done/Check the output against what it must contain; the exit code only says the process ended.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTLosing $HOMEhttps://stather.ing/journey/2026-07-losing-home/https://stather.ing/journey/2026-07-losing-home/A local process renamed a parent of my home directory mid-session. Everything not in git or a backup was gone. The lab grew up that week.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe lab beginshttps://stather.ing/journey/2026-03-the-lab-begins/https://stather.ing/journey/2026-03-the-lab-begins/The organisation licenses Anthropic. My own subscription turns toward my own curiosities. This is where the story really starts.Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTFirst public reposhttps://stather.ing/journey/2026-02-first-public-repos/https://stather.ing/journey/2026-02-first-public-repos/Evenings and weekends go public on GitHub. A local-model benchmark, Temporal patterns in Go, and a knowledge site for agents.Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTTeaching the teamhttps://stather.ing/journey/2026-01-teaching-the-team/https://stather.ing/journey/2026-01-teaching-the-team/Skills, documents, one-on-ones, group sessions, and an anime explainer on YouTube to lower the entry bar.Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTClaude Codehttps://stather.ing/journey/2025-12-claude-code/https://stather.ing/journey/2025-12-claude-code/Introduced to Claude Code. Within two weeks I had downgraded Cursor and bought the top Claude tier. Never looked back.Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTCursor at workhttps://stather.ing/journey/2025-05-cursor-at-work/https://stather.ing/journey/2025-05-cursor-at-work/First AI pairing partner, on real SRE work. Within weeks I was paying for my own Pro licence.Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT