Blog (page 12) • Chris Dzombak

… has too many hobbies.

Featured Posts ★

What software engineers bring to AI-assisted software development

LLMs don’t mean the end of software engineering as a profession.

Why tech companies encourage their software engineers to use LLMs

It's not news that many tech companies are encouraging or even requiring use of LLM coding tools like Claude Code. While reading Sean Goedecke's post about bad code at big companies, it occurred to me that tech companies are happy to have their software engineers use …

Streamlining my user-level CLAUDE.md

This post follows up on my post about getting good results from Claude Code. I've recently streamlined my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md based on: * Informal observations about what Claude does and doesn't do well * A desire to avoid conflicting with principles that seem to be built into …

Getting Good Results from Claude Code: Writing Good Prompts

Key to getting good results from Claude Code (and similar LLM programming tools) is writing good prompts. This is one area where your own programming expertise comes into play; you need to use it to provide guidance to the LLM and nudge it in the right direction. Good prompts are …

Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools

Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …

Getting Good Results from Claude Code

An updated version of my user-level CLAUDE.md is featured in this post from December 2, 2025. I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write …

Recent Posts

Integrating URLs into the Finder file-browsing experience

macOS services to quickly create URL shotcuts on the filesystem.

I wrote ‘hosts-timer’ to help quit my (desktop) Twitter and Facebook habits

Part of the Project Announcements series. It was really easy for me to get into the habit of checking Facebook and Twitter while waiting for my computer to finish something. These sites are, after all, designed to be addicting. There are some apps that are supposed to help solve this, …

Tiny Side Project: Lofi Cafe.app

An Electron wrapper for lofi.cafe and friends.

I got into 3D printing, and it feels like magic

In which Chris gains a superpower.

LAKE.app

Following a recent weekend trip, I wrote a simple little app that plays a recording of waves on Lake Michigan crashing at the shore. It’s around 14~15 minutes long, and it loops perfectly. The app’s “artwork,” such as it is, consists of two photos (shot on iPhone) …

LAKE.app GitHub repository

Michigan COVID Vaccine Links

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout appears to be a disorganized mess. Here, in no particular order, are some helpful links for people in Michigan (and particularly in Washtenaw County): * Washtenaw County COVID-19 Vaccination Form * Washtenaw County COVID-19 page * Meijer COVID-19 Vaccine Clinic Info / Registration * Rite-Aid Vaccine Scheduler * CVS Appointments * Walgreens Vaccine …

Deferred Tasks, Project Templates, and More: Customizing Things with AppleScript

In this post, I share some AppleScripts I use to implement additional features in the Things to-do app: OmniFocus-style deferred tasks, project templates that live in the Bear notes app, and more.

Now: Feb. 2021

Reading: As I was last month, I’m still working through and enjoying Barack Obama’s A Promised Land; I’m about halfway through it now. I’m also reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner, a 1990s-era dive into the history of the Internet and its predecessor, …

Redirecting Hacker News traffic away from your site via Nginx configuration

If you wish to redirect traffic from Hacker News away from your site for some reason, placing these nginx configuration directives in your site’s server { block will do this trick. This won’t work inside a location block, at least in my experience. This snippet was last updated December …

Why I use Arq instead of restic for macOS backups

I recently finished upgrading all my Macs to the long-awaited version 7 release of my preferred backup software, Arq. I use it to backup all my Macs and Windows computers to the cloud storage provider Wasabi, which is inexpensive relative to eg. AWS S3. I use the open-source backup software …

Ship electricity usage data from an Energy Bridge to InfluxDB

Part of the Home Energy and Environment Monitoring series. A while back, I signed up for DTE Energy’s Insight feature, which lets you monitor your home’s electricity usage in real time (and natural gas usage, but only at one-day resolution). To make this work, they ship you a …

Replacing iTunes, Music.app, iTunes Match, and iCloud Music Library

Part of the Project Logs series. More follow-up from my recent “Now” post: I’ve finally (mostly) extricated my music library from the entirety of Apple’s music ecosystem. This post documents how and why I did that. The Problems A long, long time ago, I used iTunes to play …

Securing my personal SSH infrastructure with Yubikeys

One recently-completed project I mentioned in January’s “Now” post was locking down SSH in my personal computing infrastructure using Yubikeys. In this post, I’ll outline my goals, the strategy I took, and the problems and solutions I ran into along the way.