Self-taught software developer from the Netherlands. I build back-end systems, quantitative trading algorithms, and the occasional Mac app. This site is where I write about the things I learn along the way.
For the past six weeks a machine I built has been doing part of my quant research for me. It proposes a hypothesis, writes the strategy itself, backtests it across twelve out-of-sample windows, and tells me which ideas are dead. It has run around 700 experiments and nothing has survived holdout. That reads like a verdict on autoresearch and it is not one, it is a verdict on my harness.
Most agent frameworks default to call the model again. This post is about a personal agent built around the opposite default — do we actually need to call the model this time? — and the four pieces (main loop, scheduler, provider layer, setup flow) that fall out of taking that question seriously. The project is currently shelved; the parts that survive into the next iteration are the scheduler, the preprocessor pattern, and the provider abstraction.
Full spec-and-review ceremony on every task slowed the build to a crawl, so I forked superpowers into two speed lanes. The audit put a number on it: 27 subagent runs for 11 tasks, one fix loop eating 22 percent of them. Upstream shipped its own router a day after my routing change, so the problem was real.
ta v2.0.0 ships ta.js, ta.py, and ta.go on the same major version, with the same indicator set audited end-to-end against textbook formulas and a comparative benchmark in each language. Pure-JS ta.js wins 66 of 67 cross-library cases at 100k bars; pure-Go ta.go wins or ties everything in its field. The Python story is more complicated, and the post is honest about why.
Hourly went live on the Mac App Store today, alongside the direct download from this site. It is free, local, no account, no paywall behind any feature. I built it in roughly two weeks with agentic coding tools as the cheapest empirical test I could run on whether agentic coding has actually started to break a paywalled SaaS category.
Magento 2's indexer architecture is not built for an 800K-product catalog with daily supplier-feed updates. The _cl changelog tables grow faster than the cron can drain them, and eventually something gives. This is the nightly reindex-and-truncate cron I now run, why the order of operations matters, and why none of the Magento experts I asked found this in six months.
