Newsletter/Sharpening the axe
Build Notes

Sharpening the axe

A week with barely any visible output — and more progress than most. What a silent six-hour CI burn taught me, why my second brain needed a floor plan, and a one-shot prompt to build your family a chore app.

The Procrastinator · 4 min read · July 6, 2026
The same bedroom twice: buried under a clothes avalanche on the left, tidy on the right with the app's zone board on a phone

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — attributed to Abraham Lincoln

That was my week. Almost nothing shipped that you can read — instead I built the machine that ships: a self-serve publishing system for this site, guardrails for my CI, and a floor plan for a knowledge base that had quietly turned into a maze. Three things from that are worth stealing.

Automation you never watch burns money quietly

My social-preview images are generated by a bot. It “just ran” for weeks — until one call hung. No error, no red badge, nothing: GitHub simply kept the job alive to its six-hour cap. Per run. Hundreds of CI minutes gone, silently. The fix was two lines; the lesson is bigger: even when automation “just runs”, glance at what it’s actually doing. One look at run durations would have caught this on day one. Trust, but audit.

What tripped me up: I let my second brain grow without a floor plan

For months I fed my personal knowledge system — every project, idea, log and goal went in. It worked, until it didn’t: the dashboard showed everything and told me nothing. This week I had to retrofit what should have been there from day one — a slow “strategy” layer separate from daily work, a register that links things instead of moving them, a home view that shows five things instead of fifty.

Dark dashboard with a focus column (today, this week, reminders), a spotlight project card and a compact log — filled with generic demo data
The public dummy twin of my cockpit: one view, five things, not fifty. (Yes, the demo data says “ship the newsletter draft”. It knows.)

The abstraction, so you can skip the pain: a system you feed daily needs a structure that serves your goals — designed before it grows, not after it hurts. Ask early: what must this show me in six months? If the answer is “everything”, that’s not an answer.

A fun project for your weekend

Build your family a chore app — in one day. Here’s the one-shot prompt to get you started:

✦ Prompt Claude Code

Build me a mobile-first family chore web app: vanilla JS + Supabase (magic-link auth, one shared household joined via invite code). Zones (kitchen, bathroom, …) each hold recurring tasks with an interval in days; nextDue = done_at + interval_days. Colour each zone tile by urgency: red = due now, amber = due by Sunday, green = calm. Keep it to one HTML file and one JS file — no framework, no build step.

Zone plan: a tile grid of rooms — mint tiles say all done, a sand tile shows 2 due, a rosé tile is due now

Take a look at mine: the build story — built in a day, live, and my family actually uses it. The trickiest part wasn’t the code; it was remembering that a chore app should nag rooms, not people. (Code’s linked from the build page.)

Mine runs the pastel version: rosé = due now, sand = by Sunday, mint = calm.

Sharpen first. The chopping gets easy. ✦

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