I BUILDRANDOMTHINGSon purpose,
in public.
Hi — I'm Captain Random. I build production software, weird little experiments, and document all of it honestly. This site is the public part: real projects, real workflows, real evaluations of the tools I use.
What I build,
and why I'm still
excited about it.
AGENTIC AI & ARCHITECTURE
Building when code generation is free. How I architect agentic-first systems, what works in practice, what doesn't.
01RETAIL & HOSPITALITY OPS
23 years inside UK enterprise retail and hospitality. Real workflows, real failure points, real software-meets-floor knowledge.
02AI TOOL EVALS
Honest, practical assessments of Claude Code, Archon, and whatever else I'm shipping with. Includes what didn't work.
03CREATIVE AI
Music (Suno workflow), generative art, video. A hobby that produces real output, documented as it goes.
04BUILD IN PUBLIC
Projects from idea to implementation. The process is the point — failures included.
05LEARNING LOG
What I'm currently studying, how far through it I am, and whether it was worth the time.
06Recent writing.
Audits find what's wrong, not what's missing
A page-by-page audit ran for three days catching deprecated ARIA roles, fabricated copy, and missing hover-pause behaviour. Then I opened the site on my phone and the nav menu wasn't there. Not wrong. Just not there. That's a class of bug audits can't catch, and the fix isn't to audit harder.
macOS won't let your cron read your work: three days inside TCC
A daily launchd job that reads from /Volumes/b/ looked trivial. Three days, four wrong approaches, and one AppleScript .app bundle later, I'd learned why granting Full Disk Access to a shell script is a UI fiction.
An MDX content pipeline grows three kinds of complexity
Naïve MDX setups (one file in, one HTML out) hit three walls as they scale. Routing complexity. Authoring complexity. Citation complexity. Each grows non-linearly with post count; each has a single high-leverage fix.
Workshop.
Build log.
In your inbox.
New posts, project updates, and honest tool reviews — roughly every two weeks. No marketing. No sponsorships. Just what I actually built and learned.