Andrew Detwiler
What I built, what broke, and what I'd do differently.
The video ran on my own machine, so every take cost nothing. That made generating easy and deciding expensive, and the only progress I made came from building things that measure instead of things that generate.
My agent's memory goes stale and I wanted the machine to notice on its own. The best idea found nothing across fifty real cases, and that null result turned out to be the whole answer.
One paste, five small files, about sixty-five lines. What the setup prompt actually does to a real repo, including the parts it got wrong.
Borrowing another team's writing is genuinely useful. It also turns retrieval into an attack surface. What I built, and what my own tests found in it.
Once your codebase has a real base, testing stops being one thing and becomes many shapes you build around the code. Here are the shapes I have been building, and the one step none of them replace.
No hosted database, no SaaS. Markdown as the source of truth, links that make it navigable, hooks that surface it, and a disposable local index for search.
The whole method: twelve short docs, copyable templates, and a one-paste prompt. Plain markdown you can take today. Nothing to install, nothing to buy.
AI agents start every session at zero. The fix isn't a smarter model. It's writing things down where the work happens.
A short email, sent when there's something worth saying.