Barhttp://mortenolsen.pro/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-back-of-the-box/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-back-of-the-box/Right now, somewhere, a piece of software is reading a document with someone's life inside it and producing a number. I built one of these in a weekend to find out how much I should worry. The answer is: a lot, quietly, and with the dashboard staying green throughout.Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-benchmark-i-almost-didnt-run/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-benchmark-i-almost-didnt-run/I picked the textbook-correct model and accepted the compute cost as the price of doing things properly. Then I almost gave up on the project. Then I ran a benchmark, and the benchmark told me the textbook was wrong.Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-elephant-in-the-context-window/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-elephant-in-the-context-window/I told an LLM 'don't use var' and then watched it use var. So I built four experiments to find out why. I was wrong every time. The answer was better than anything I'd predicted.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/does-your-tone-change-your-code/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/does-your-tone-change-your-code/I fed the same coding prompts through open LLMs in different tones of voice and looked at the model's internal representations. Turns out it cares more about how you ask than what you ask.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-trillion-dollar-while-loop/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-trillion-dollar-while-loop/The entire AI agent industry is built on thirty lines of Python. Let me ruin the word 'agent' for you.Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-dev-is-dead-long-live-the-dev/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/the-dev-is-dead-long-live-the-dev/I build agentic AI platforms for a living and tinker with them for fun. The green grass is real — but getting there required breaking a lot of things first. Here is what went wrong, what we are losing, and why I think you can put the doom articles down.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/llm-maintainable-code/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/llm-maintainable-code/I refactored my personal AI to be "more maintainable" for humans, only to find out I might have broken its brain. Is what we call good code actually just noise to an LLM?Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/reinventing-the-link-from-seo-bait-to-semantic-trust/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/reinventing-the-link-from-seo-bait-to-semantic-trust/I accidentally reinvented PageRank, realized why it’s broken today, and decided to try building a personal web of trust instead.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/grown-ups-guide-personal-ai/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/grown-ups-guide-personal-ai/Handing the keys to your digital life to an AI is like juggling chainsaws. I built a persistent assistant that knows me, but without the ability to blow my savings at a robot casino.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/i-gave-an-ai-root-access-to-my-kubernetes-cluster/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/i-gave-an-ai-root-access-to-my-kubernetes-cluster/I gave an AI root access to my Kubernetes cluster. It fixed a BIOS issue I didn’t know I had. I am still terrified.Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/clubhouse-protocol/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/clubhouse-protocol/What if community rules were enforced by code instead of moderators? A thought experiment on building a "Constitution-as-Code" for messaging.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/hyperconnect/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/hyperconnect/I have "ecosystem envy" for Apple’s Continuity features. Here is my plan to build a vendor-neutral mesh that makes devices talk across any protocol.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-small-llm-trick/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-small-llm-trick/I often forget how my own projects work. Here is a simple trick to give AI assistants "long-term memory" so they can help me remember.Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/simple-service-pattern/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/simple-service-pattern/You don’t need a heavy framework for dependency injection. Here is a 60-line pattern that gives you testability without the "semi-truck" complexity.Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/node-security/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/node-security/Our industry runs on packages published by strangers at 2 a.m. Here is why that is terrifying, and how to protect yourself.Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-meta-talk-about-git-strategies/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-meta-talk-about-git-strategies/What if Git wasn’t just for code, but the source of truth for your entire infrastructure? A look at treating Git as your "expected state".Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/bob-the-algorithm/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/bob-the-algorithm/I’m bad at planning my day, so I built a silicon assistant named Bob to do it for me. He even accounts for travel time.Fri, 06 May 2022 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-defense-for-the-coding-challenge/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/a-defense-for-the-coding-challenge/Code challenges get a lot of hate, but they might actually be the fairest way to hire introverts and people who aren’t great at "selling" themselves.Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/how-to-hire-engineers-by-an-engineer/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/how-to-hire-engineers-by-an-engineer/A hard truth for hiring managers: your company isn’t unique. Here is how to hire for passion instead of just checking off a list of skills.Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMThttp://mortenolsen.pro/posts/my-home-runs-redux/http://mortenolsen.pro/posts/my-home-runs-redux/Why I use a React state management framework to run my lights, and why your smart home probably isn’t actually "smart".Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT