Taking a Spell

I built Friday. It's live, people use it, and it does what I wanted it to do.

Then I wanted to write about how I'd made it, and I found there was nothing to write from.

The code is all still there. What isn't there is the human side of it: what I tried, what I pivoted away from, what I took out and why, what I was thinking on the days it wasn't working. To get any of that back I'd have to go through the repos and try to remind myself what I'd done when. I felt exhausted just thinking about it, so I didn't. The story never got told, and I felt a bit sad about that.

I put a lot into learning how to work with Claude and program the things I wanted. I taught myself a lot doing it. And it's a bit glossed over now it's made, because the only thing left is the thing itself, which looks obvious in a way it never was.

What I wanted was a record of what I'd been doing and feeling as I turned, pivoted, reworked, failed, changed and removed. That doesn't come out of a commit log.

This isn't new for me. I've done a lot of work over my career, client and personal, that I felt genuinely accomplished about in the moment and couldn't reconstruct even later the same day. I've always been a maker. I make things often. But my brain moves fast and changes context so often that it's hard to go back to something once the spark has left.

I didn't want that to happen again.

Being up late has been unusually productive recently. I was falling asleep, thinking about a small prompt I'd been using that asks me two questions every few working sessions and writes my answers down without tidying them. A few days of that had already changed how I work more than anything else I've tried. By morning I'd decided to take it and make it into something other people could use, and by dinner it existed.

So I built it, and I gave it a name. The first version was Captain's Log, because I love Star Trek. This one had evolved past that. It wasn't a note with a date on it any more. It was a conversation, and it was improving my craft and changing what I noticed about my own work.

I landed on Familiar: the companion in the old stories that sits beside the work, notices things, and helps the crafter. A familiar doesn't do the work for you. It isn't you. I liked that. It could be a conversation partner instead of an automation tool for its own sake.

The hard part was deciding how Familiar would challenge me. It never rewrites your file. It asks for a human answer, and it helps you articulate your own story. It's slower on purpose: it asks hard questions and it expects you to answer them.

My first version was a command I had to remember to run. I forgot, more than a few times. I work on too many things at once for that to have worked, so now it goes looking on its own, across all of them, and catches the work as a session ends.

The machine writes down what got built. It can't tell me why I built it, and it doesn't try. That part is a question, and the question is for me.

A few days before that sleepless night, winding down a session, Captain's Log asked me what was worrying me about the project I was building. It asked, and I answered. I told it I was "nervous about whether I want this to be my thing". That's a real answer. It isn't the answer I'd have given a person in the room, because a person in the room would have wanted reassuring.

Then it asked whether anything had changed my mind about what the work was for. This is what I wrote:

A few days. Same thread. Opposite answer. Nothing wrote that but the questions, and nothing would have caught the change but the habit of writing the answers down as I gave them. I didn't notice my own mind moving. The file did.

The open-ended questions suit how I think. They give me room to push into my self-awareness. Doing is my default. Doing is how I hide.

Friday is how I know. What you build outlives the thinking that made it. The only way to keep your own story is to catch it while you're still in the work.

Familiar is for makers. Whether you're vibe coding or writing code yourself, Familiar helps you tell that story from the terminal and work through it. Familiar is for people who use rubber ducks and forget if they don't write it down. I'm one of you. Familiar catches the thought while you're in the moment, so that when you want to tell someone how it happened, you have that story in your own words. It makes a small ritual of it: take a spell to really think about yourself, your work, your audience and the problems you're solving. Like all good spellcraft, it works because it helps you be present with the work.

Familiar is free, open source software for makers who want to write about what they build.

What did you ship this week that you haven't stopped to think about? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

Thank you for reading.

Intentionaut is a fortnightly letter from Saielle DaSilva on design, product, data and AI. What's working, what isn't, and how to keep your bearings in a world that’s always changing.

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