Build Diary

What's actually happening in the lab.

No polish, no content calendar pretending to be a schedule. Just what got built, broken and figured out along the way — roughly every 2-3 days.

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2026-08-12 Knowledge Vaults

My Obsidian vault had zero backups until tonight

Realized my Obsidian vault has never had a real backup, iCloud sync doesn't count. Wrote a nightly git backup script, then found .obsidian/workspace.json rewriting itself on every app open and burying every real diff. Fixed with one line in .gitignore.

2026-08-11 Agent Workflows

An agent cited a GitHub issue that never existed

Caught a coding agent twice in a couple of weeks slipping a fabricated reference into a solid piece of writing, a changelog line citing an issue number from a tracker that doesn't exist, then a test run claiming 38 seconds when the real CI log said 6 minutes. Now no number or reference goes out without me pointing at the real source first.

2026-08-09 AI Products

AI Control Center's image studio stopped faking its own progress bar

Rebuilt the image side of AI Control Center into three clear sections and fixed a progress bar that used to fake percentages ComfyUI never actually sent.

2026-08-07 AI Products

Local LLM Matrix v0.37.3 stops hiding the prompt it actually sends

Went looking for a prompt to quote in a write-up and found out Local LLM Matrix never saved it anywhere, the data model just had no field for it. Fixed in v0.37.3, along with a live control center, a reset button, Ollama auto-start and a switch to pipx for installs.

2026-08-03 AI Products

AI Control Center found two Ollama processes fighting over the same port

AI Control Center is the one item on the "soon" list that's actually further along than the label suggests. Today it caught two Ollama processes silently fighting over the same port.

2026-08-02 Knowledge Vaults

Renaming a note in Finder quietly broke twelve backlinks

Renamed a project note straight in Finder today instead of through Obsidian. Seemed faster. Wasn't.

2026-07-30 Local AI Systems

Q5 quantization pushed my 18GB MacBook into swap

Spent the evening testing whether Q5_K_M quantization of Qwen2.5 14B would run better than the Q4_K_M I've been using for a few weeks, on my 18GB MacBook Pro M3 Pro.

2026-07-27 Knowledge Vaults

Let an agent backfill tags on 200 old notes instead of reorganizing anything

Back in an old note from a few weeks ago I promised myself one rule for the vault. Every new note gets a date and at least one tag.

2026-07-24 Prompt Engineering

Getting a local model to stop breaking JSON took one example, not more rules

Spent way too long this week trying to get a local 7B model to output clean JSON for a small script, no dedicated JSON mode available on that one.

2026-07-21 Agent Workflows

Two agents, one refactor, very different results

Spent Friday evening running the same small refactor through two different coding agents to see how far apart they actually are in practice.

2026-07-18 AI Products

Obsidian AI Vault has a first working search, and it's slower than I'd like

Started actually building Obsidian AI Vault this week instead of just talking about it. Search works now, indexing is still too slow.

2026-07-15 Markdown

The only file format I've never had to migrate away from

Set up git for this site today, first time this project's had real version control.

2026-07-15 Reflection

Two weeks in, and the backlog already won

Two weeks since launch. Four projects marked "soon" on the build log are still marked "soon."

2026-07-13 AI Products

Before it was Local LLM Matrix, it was called Local LLM Scout

Caught something today while cleaning up the build log: it still listed "Local LLM Scout" as something coming soon.

2026-07-10 Agent Workflows

I let an agent loose on my own website

Out of curiosity I pointed a coding agent at this site's repo and just said "clean up the CSS."

2026-07-08 Knowledge Vaults

My Obsidian vault is a mess, and that's fine

I tried to reorganize my notes vault this weekend.

2026-07-05 Prompt Engineering

Why my prompt needed to be three times longer

Spent an evening this week convinced a 7B model was just bad at a summarization task.

2026-07-03 Build Log

Three days in and something's already broken

Shared the link in a couple of places over the weekend and got the first outside eyes on the site.

2026-06-30 Launch

Site's live. Now the real work starts.

goekmen.ai is live as of today.