I had a breakthrough while working on bjornstack that made me realize how I could make an MVP of breadcrumb, the tool I’ve wanted to build for ~18 months.

So anyway, bjornstack is my opinionated take on how to write code, aimed at constraining and guiding genies to get their work done. And while working on it, like I have been whenever I’m working with genies, I got thoughts that I wanted to explore later, or ideas for other things I’m working on. I realized that since I started using beads capturing in this project has gotten easier, while chatting I just mention we need “a new bead about x because y provide all the context we have here” and then there’d be a new bead linked to the work we were doing, and I can just pick it up later.

But as soon as it was something for another project, or even just “I need to remember to pack the charger when I leave the office today,” then I had to break out to capture the thought, and blow my stack and lose my flow. And if I don’t capture it, I lose the thought.

In this devlog I’ll make a change in my n8n POSSE setup, that could’ve taken ~an hour if I kept doing it manually as I had, but instead I spent ~5 hours tidying and removing manual steps for the future.

The work itself was about making my “scraps,” that is this site’s tweets, be sent out raw to my syndication targets. I feel that sending a link to something you see in the preview, or it could be inline in the post, is a bit much, I should just let it show up in the platform itself.

I have been working on automating my POSSE setup, and ended up trying n8n and it has been a great experience, there are so many plugins that it’s mostly just wiring things together.

But, I discovered that despite being within the character limit, one of my URLs were truncated when posting to Mastodon. This is because Mastodon does something non-obvious: it treats all URLs as 23 characters, no matter if they’re shorter or longer.