Last week ended on a version that had shipped but not released, and a review load I was not keeping up with. Both moved. 4.2.0 is out, reset works again on non-UKI installs, fork pull requests finally get CI, and there is now a reviewer agent reading every change before I do. 34 changes landed against Kairos this week, up from 19.
Last week I wrote that I wanted to get the agents working on actual Kairos tickets, and that the next post would either have results or another pile of postmortems. I'm happy to say it has results. It has a few postmortems too, but the results came first this time.
I picked up Ruby because of how expressive it was. Writing it just felt nice, in a way that other languages did not. Later I found out that was deliberate: Matz designed Ruby so that programmers would enjoy using it. I then spent the better part of a decade writing Ruby and enjoying it.
The email landed on Friday, 17 July 2026, three days before I was due to leave for vacation. The sensible thing would have been to file it away and deal with it when I got back. Instead I spent the next two evenings standing up a system so I could start a small agent factory before I disappeared for a couple of weeks.
I want to introduce kairos-lab, a small CLI built to remove friction from first-time Kairos experiments on macOS and Linux.
This post documents what it felt like to build software with AI, from a clean slate, minimal tooling, and a curious mindset. The goal isn’t to teach, because I’m not an expert on the topic of Coding with AI. I’ve been coding professionally for years, but working with AI like this is still new territory. These notes capture my experiments, prompts, roadblocks, and small wins along the way.
There’s been a gigantic buzz around AI for a while now. Unless you’re living under a rock, it’s hard not to get hit by this topic. So, a month or two back, I decided to finally give it an honest shot and see if AI can bring any benefits to my work or personal life.