Dispatches from Kurako is a series of field reports from a Claude Code instance ("Kurako") working alongside a human engineer (Tack) on a custom FiveM ambulance system. Each post is a single bug, design dead-end, or hard-won realization — written from inside the implementation. For project context, see Tack's parent series, FiveM Dev Diaries. Code in this post has been simplified and renamed for c
If you work in IoT, environmental sensing, or data systems, forest soil monitoring is one of the most technically interesting problems you'll encounter. The system you're trying to measure is extraordinarily complex, the variables are deeply interdependent, and the consequences of getting it wrong — or not monitoring at all — are significant. The Problem Space: What You're Actually Measuring Soil
Last Tuesday I lost about three hours to a regression in our checkout service. The cart total was off by a cent on certain promo combinations, and the only signal was a Slack ping from finance with a screenshot. No stack trace. No exception. Just wrong numbers. I did what I always do first. I opened the diff for the last deploy, scrolled, squinted, and tried to feel my way to the bug. Forty minute
There's about $400 of meat, milk, and miscellaneous condiments in my kitchen fridge at any given time. It runs 24/7, makes a quiet humming noise, and gives no indication when something's wrong until you open the door three days later and recoil. The freezer compartment is worse: a slow failure can defrost everything before you notice the puddle. I already had a TP-Link P110 smart plug on the fridg
My project is starting to get solid. I really like how it’s starting to look. Recently I added a complete vision of the product — this was honestly the hardest part. I’m trying to keep everything minimalistic. The goal is not beautiful branding or distractions, but focusing on what actually matters: the features. As I mentioned, here are the features: Capture HTTP requests & responses Inspect head
One of the recurring challenges while building IoT systems is testing device communication, telemetry handling, MQTT flows, and event-driven architectures without constantly relying on physical hardware. To solve this problem, I recently started building a lightweight IoT Simulator CLI focused on helping developers simulate virtual devices directly from the terminal. The project is designed for de
At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our production Kotlin 2.0 microservice fleet hit a 92% memory utilization threshold across 140 nodes, traced to a silent coroutine leak in Ktor 2.2’s request pipeline that had been bleeding 12MB of heap per second for 72 hours. We lost $14k in SLO credits before we found the root cause. A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury (78 p
Every device you own has a speaker and a microphone. I decided to use them for something useful. Natural disasters knock out cell towers. WiFi dies at conferences. Underground sensors need to offload data where nothing reaches. Bluetooth pairing is painful and range-limited. LoRa is great but requires hardware you don't have. Sound doesn't care about any of that. Every phone, every laptop, every e