Curated from writings on casey.berlin. Pieces that show how I think, build, and work, not the journal that lives next door.
Replacing gpt-4o-mini under Stolperfalle with a blind twelve-case eval, then auditing the 599 knowledge units it had already written.
github.com/CaseyRo/mcp-stolperfalleContinue on casey.berlin →A year after writing that AI bends the iron triangle, the numbers: commits, tokens, hours, and the one line I did not want to write.
Continue on casey.berlin →Building an MCP server on the Mockuuups Studio API, and the four undocumented behaviours that shaped every design decision in it.
github.com/CaseyRo/mcp-mockuuupsContinue on casey.berlin →The boring disciplines behind a data migration you can actually prove: irreplaceability order, checksum gates, offsite-restore tests, uid preservation, and verifying by function.
Continue on casey.berlin →A Raspberry Pi, an e-paper panel, and a battery that lasts because the device spends almost all its life switched off. The architecture, the design, and what the schedule taught me.
Continue on casey.berlin →Retiring a flaky, load-bearing box in an afternoon: DNS, public ingress, home automations and all, with nobody noticing.
Continue on casey.berlin →A field-tested runbook for moving Zigbee2MQTT from an ember (EFR32) coordinator to a zstack (CC2652P) one in place, including the undocumented channel_mask trap, a socket-contention root cause, and what an AI pair-operator actually contributed. With three postscripts: the beta-firmware auto-update ambush, the week-long hunt that ended in a wrong-board-variant firmware and a Wi-Fi AP squatting on the mesh's spectrum, and a 72-hour soak that finally turned the claim into proof.
Continue on casey.berlin →The infrastructure layer of MCP has already won. The mass-market moment has not arrived. That gap is exactly where the cheap experiments live.
Continue on casey.berlin →why mcp-readwise has fourteen tools, but the one that actually mattered ships markdown to your Reader Library by SMTP, and what that detour says about API design.
github.com/CaseyRo/mcp-readwiseContinue on casey.berlin →If you've run a process for years, you already know what the software should do. Writing that down is now most of the work of building it.
Continue on casey.berlin →In early February close to a trillion dollars left software stocks in a week. Eight months on, what it said about bigness, and about the firms that sell it.
Continue on casey.berlin →Five signs a business is ready for digital change, starting with the five-hour test - how much of your team's week goes on work a system could do.
Continue on casey.berlin →How we built a proper state machine for our home automation, and why Home Assistant handles devices while Node-RED handles the logic.
Continue on casey.berlin →Mid-sized companies often feel behind on digitalisation. Having worked inside IKEA, ING and Volkswagen and with small firms in Brandenburg, I think they're better placed than the big ones.
Continue on casey.berlin →Fear moves budgets, not people. What psychology says about why AI rollouts sold as transform-or-die meet resistance, and what helps teams get from threat to agency.
Continue on casey.berlin →I asked Google about dog food, got my answer and clicked nothing. What that means for a small business site, and what I don't know yet.
Continue on casey.berlin →Consultancies sell the expert with the answer. Now that answers are cheap, what's left worth paying for?
Continue on casey.berlin →Fast, cheap, or good, pick two. AI bends the iron triangle by stretching speed and budget, but quality stays stubbornly human.
Continue on casey.berlin →One essay a month, on the way technology quietly reshapes ordinary life. It is the thinking half of this practice, written next door and sent by email. No tips, no frameworks.