For six months I assumed nobody could tell whether anyone read this blog, because I had never added analytics. Wiring up Cloudflare Web Analytics by hand taught me two things: the obvious place to paste the snippet would have shipped my Playwright suite's page views into the dashboard, and the dashboard had been quietly counting my visitors for two months anyway. 🧪 Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104 Publishing into the void # The site’s hugo.toml had a googleAnalytics line commented out since roughly the first commit. I never uncommented it. GA4 wants a cookie disclosure, ships a chunky client, and ad blockers eat it anyway, which felt like a lot of ceremony for a personal blog whose one open question was “does anybody visit.”
Paste one of my post links into a social preview and the card comes up with no image. The site itself renders fine, every page, every browser. The culprit was one character in `hugo.toml`: `baseURL = "/"`, which quietly turns every absolute URL the site emits into a relative one that only a browser can love. 🧪 Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104 The symptom # Share cards without images, that was the visible part. View source on any page and the metadata told the fuller story:
I changed one sentence in a blog post, opened a pull request, and watched CI spend about 85 seconds installing a headless Chromium to confirm my prose still turned into HTML. The obvious fix, telling the workflow to ignore content paths, would have quietly broken every merge instead. Symptom: a browser for a one-line edit # Every pull request on this blog runs two jobs: a lint job, and a build-and-test job. The second one builds the site with Hugo, link-checks the output with htmltest, then installs a headless Chromium and runs a Playwright suite against a live hugo server. End to end, roughly 85 seconds, and almost all of it is Playwright.
If you use tmux, you've hit this: ten windows open and they're all named `zsh` or `node`. Which one had your AI agent running? No idea. Let's make tmux label windows usefully. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 3 of 4 1 2 3 4 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux New to tmux? It’s a “terminal multiplexer”: it splits one terminal into many windows and panes that survive disconnects. The only vocabulary you need here: a window is like a browser tab inside tmux; the bar at the bottom lists them. The prefix is the key you press before a tmux command, commonly Ctrl+b (mine is Ctrl+a). Why everything is named zsh # By default tmux has a setting called automatic-rename turned on. It renames each window after whatever program is running in it. A shell? zsh. A Node program (like Claude Code)? node. Helpful in theory, useless when everything collapses to the same word.
Once you're comfortable with AI coding agents, you start running several at once: one refactoring here, one writing tests there, one stuck waiting for your approval. Keeping them straight is its own little skill. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 4 of 4 1 2 3 4 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Here are two ways to do it: a lightweight tmux plugin, and (briefly) dedicated “AI terminal” apps.
You're deep in a great Claude Code conversation. You close the terminal. The next day you want to pick up where you left off… and you can't find it. Sound familiar? Let's fix that. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 1 of 4 1 2 3 4 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux What is a “session,” and where does it go? # Every time you run claude, you start a session, one conversation, with its full history. When you quit, that history doesn’t vanish. Claude Code saves it to disk, organized per project folder, here:
In Part 1 we learned that named sessions are easy to find. Now let's make naming automatic with a hook. This is also a perfect first hook project, so I'll explain the whole idea from scratch. Taming Claude Code Sessions · Part 2 of 4 1 2 3 4 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux Part 1 left us with one chore: you still have to remember to name your sessions. Let’s delete that chore.
The AI coding tool landscape in 2026 has finally settled into four serious players: Claude Code , Cursor , GitHub Copilot , and Windsurf . I've used all four on real work. This is the honest comparison. Forget feature checklists. What matters is how each tool feels under real engineering work, the kind I do every day as a senior software engineer at Meta. I built this site primarily with Claude Code, but I’ve put serious hours into the others.
A Stream Deck has five session keys. I usually have six or seven Claude Code sessions running. When a new one shows up, the muscle memory test isn't "does the right session get evicted", it is "do the four survivors stay on the keys they were already on." Building ClaudeDeck · Part 3 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Two bits of context for anyone new to the stack: Stream Deck is Elgato’s USB grid of programmable LCD keys, and a “session” here is a single Claude Code conversation: claude running in one terminal tab, with its own working directory, its own context window, its own history. LRU stands for “least-recently used,” the standard cache-eviction policy: when you need to make room, drop the entry nobody has touched in the longest time.)
Claude Code wants to run a shell command. I want to press a physical Stream Deck key, the YES key two inches to the left of my keyboard, to approve it. The hook gets exactly one HTTP response to decide allow vs deny. The key press might land in 200 milliseconds; it might land seven minutes later, after I've been pulled into a meeting and come back. The trick is that Claude Code's hook timeout is 600 seconds, which turns out to be just enough headroom to hold the HTTP response open the whole time and let a hardware button write the answer. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 6 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Setup, for anyone who hasn’t seen this stack before: Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude, and one of its hook events, PreToolUse, is a script Claude spawns and waits on before running a tool like Bash or Edit. The script’s stdout decides “allow” / “deny” / “ask”. Stream Deck is Elgato’s USB grid of programmable LCD keys. The plumbing I’m describing here lives in a daemon, a background process at 127.0.0.1:9127, that the hook script POSTs to and that the Stream Deck plugin connects to over WebSocket. For the hooks docs themselves and the four other gotchas in that layer, see the hooks-reality post.)
My daemon logged 111 consecutive HTTP 429s against `https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage` over an 18-hour stretch, with zero successful responses ever in its lifetime. The poller was reading `Retry-After: 272` and ignoring it. While I was arguing with the backoff, Claude Code was pushing the same `rate_limits.five_hour` and `rate_limits.seven_day` numbers to my statusline command every turn, on stdin, for free. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 5 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick framing: Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude; Claude Max is the higher-tier subscription plan with weekly and 5-hour usage windows. HTTP 429 is “Too Many Requests”, the server’s polite way of saying “back off.” Retry-After is the response header that tells the client how long to wait. OAuth is the auth protocol Claude Code uses to talk to Anthropic on behalf of a logged-in user. And the statusline (the same one I covered in the statusline side-channel post) is the script Claude Code spawns every turn with a JSON blob on stdin.)
I built a Claude Code permission gate that holds an HTTP response open until a Stream Deck key is pressed. Then I needed to inject a keystroke into Claude Code's own TTY so a key press could write `1\r` straight into Claude's stdin. Bun can hold HTTP open all day. Bun cannot reliably wrap a child PTY through `node-pty` and capture the parent shell's PID. So I split my daemon: HTTP and WebSocket stay on Bun, and a Node CommonJS subprocess owns the PTY that runs Claude. Building ClaudeDeck · Part 7 of 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS (Quick grounding before the story: a PTY (pseudo-terminal) is the kernel object every interactive shell talks to. It’s a pair of file descriptors, master and slave; the program reads/writes the slave end as if it were a real terminal, and anything you write to the master end looks to that program like a human typing. The TTY is the slave end seen from the child’s side. node-pty is Microsoft’s library that gives a JavaScript parent process a writable handle to the master. Bun is a JavaScript runtime, Node’s faster sibling, and Node CommonJS is plain old require()-based Node, no transpile step. The story below is about which runtime owns the PTY.)