Laptop Rescue, Rig, and Decision Fatigue

Chris Gmyr and TJ Miller walk through TJ's laptop locking up past safe mode, how Claude helped him rescue his work over a shared disk, and the agent state he forgot to save. They also cover Chris's Rig beta at work, off-site backups, and dotfiles, sharing insights on what to protect when your tools keep state for you.

Links

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• Podcast: Site | Twitter/X | Bluesky
• Chris: Site | Twitter/X | Bluesky
• TJ: Site | Twitter/X | Bluesky

References Mentioned

• LocalStack - how Rig runs one local DynamoDB instance with a table per service
• Novelhood - Chris's book club app, one of the side projects waiting on usage resets
• Halcyon - TJ's notes app, where Fable 5.1 as the Hive lead turned the sync build around
• OpenCode - TJ's idea for running GPT models with a rule file extension
• Pi - one of the harnesses Chris named as a base for a Rula engineering harness
• Purity Coffee Sacred Cups Star Coffee - the honey processed Starday bag Chris finished
• Bear - where TJ was writing therapy homework when the laptop froze
• Prism - one of the repos TJ rescued off the frozen disk
• Sonari - TJ's transcription app, rescued with its in-progress worktrees
• Dotbot - how TJ rebuilt his machine in 45 minutes and keeps work and personal setups in sync
• Homebrew - what Dotbot reinstalls on a fresh machine
• Setapp - part of TJ's rebuild script
• Backblaze - Chris's off-site backup instead of Time Machine
• Skate - Charm's encrypted key value store TJ uses to keep secrets out of his dotfiles
• PHP Tek - TJ's first 2027 talk submission
• Laracon US - TJ will be there and might submit
• Laracon AU - TJ's top speaking goal for the year