The move was upstream

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I spent most of a day pointing at broken cases. Each time I pointed at one, the model patched it. The next regeneration would surface a different broken case in a different file. We’d patch that. Then a third. By late afternoon I was the one suggesting we slow down and return to first principles — the model wasn’t pulling me up a level on its own.

The bug itself was small. I’ve been wiring up a pipeline that turns transcripts of my conversations with AI tools into clean Markdown for an Obsidian vault. The reasoning part — extracting topics, summarizing, tagging — was working. The rendering kept breaking. Stray characters, broken callouts, content that ended up harder to read than the original conversation had been. I was working it inside Gemini CLI, mostly on their fast tier with occasional escalation to their reasoning model. Twelve back-and-forth turns across roughly six hours of intermittent work, and we still hadn’t landed it.

Debugging on Thede Technologies

The move was upstream