It Felt Like Being Me

A few days ago I asked Claude to dig up my notes on two projects I'd been building, and the thing that went and found them was one of the two projects. A memory tool I wrote, handing me back the record of its own birth, the planning from the week I built it. I sat there a second. My own software had remembered something I'd half forgotten, which is exactly what I built it to do, and though I hadn't said it out loud yet, the reason it exists is that I forget.

The two projects are Cadence and Hindsight, the most useful things I've created since I retired, maybe in my entire career. The best software I've ever made has always been the stuff I wrote for myself, and these two are the furthest I've taken that. Cadence is a planning system I run inside Claude Code. You talk the work through, you plan it, you build it one small commit at a time, you verify it did what it claimed, and every bit of the state lives in files on disk instead of in the chat, so when the session resets, and it always resets, nothing is lost. Hindsight is the memory underneath. It grabs my session transcripts before Claude Code's cleanup wipes them, keeps a verbatim copy as the ground truth, and builds a searchable index on top that it's free to throw away and rebuild whenever it likes, because the copy is what matters and the clever part is meant to be disposable.

I tagged Cadence 1.0 in July. An hour later it started building its own 1.1, and had the first release candidate out that same night. I used 1.1 to build Hindsight. Right now 1.1 is scoping out 1.2, the tool sitting there planning its own next version while I watch. You've heard the old line about a compiler that can compile itself. It's like that, except the thing it built next wasn't another copy of itself, it was a different tool solving a different problem, and that's the part that tells me the process works instead of just chasing its own tail.

The part I didn't set out to write down is why I needed a memory badly enough to build one twice.

I tried the tools that already exist. Cognee. Mempalace. A couple more whose names I've honestly forgotten, which, if you see where this is going, is on the nose. They were okay but fragile, and the data never felt safe, and a memory you can't trust is worse than none at all, because you lean on it and then it drops you.

I have diagnosed ADHD, OCD, and a sensory processing thing, the sensitivity kind. I'm not telling you this because I'm brave or looking for sympathy, I'm telling you because it's the honest answer to why these tools look the way they do, and I'd rather say the true thing plainly than dress it up in something more comfortable.

The ADHD is the part that drops the thread. I can hold a whole system in my head, every moving piece of it, right up until something pulls my attention sideways, my husband watches it happen and laughs, he calls it the shiny ball, or squirrel, and then the thread is just gone and I come back to my own work like a stranger reading somebody else's notes. That's what Cadence is for. It writes down where I was, so the trail is still there when the thread drops, which it always does, and I get to pick the work back up instead of starting it cold. The small steps help too, they keep me pointed at one thing at a time, with the next question already waiting when I come back. It was never meant as a productivity hack, though it turns out to be one anyway. Really it's a handrail, the thing I keep a hand on so losing my place doesn't put me on the floor.

The OCD is the part that needs the record complete and correct, every i dotted and every t crossed, or it itches, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech, it's a real physical wrongness that won't let go until the thing is put right. You can read the diagnosis straight off the architecture, the verbatim archive the clever layer is never allowed to corrupt, the check that won't call a job done until it's proven the thing runs, one commit per task so the history stays complete and nothing gets quietly folded together where I can't see it, the 1.0 I wouldn't tag until I'd audited every claim and fixed every finding, none of it deferred. I thought I was just being careful, and I was, only it turned out I was being careful in a very specific, very diagnosable shape.

The sensory piece is the one I understood last, and it turned out to explain the most. For most of my life I thought I just had good instincts. Better than the people around me, and I wasn't shy about it inside my own head. I'd look at a design or a block of code and know something was wrong before I could tell you why, couldn't point at the line, I just knew, and often enough I was right. I called it intuition and I was a little smug about it.

It wasn't intuition. It was sensory input too subtle for me to notice I was taking it in, and I was reading it and handing myself the answer without the receipt. The diagnosis is what finally gave me the real word for it. The same nervous system that can't think in a loud room, that needs the desktop calm and the motion turned down and the environment under my control down to the last detail, is a nervous system running at a higher resolution than most, and higher resolution cuts both ways. In a loud room it's a tax. Pointed at a problem it's the whole reason I'm any good. The thing that reads the room as too much is the same thing that reads the bug you can't see yet.

You don't have to take that on faith, and you don't have to trust it inside code where it's easy to wave off as experience. It shows up everywhere. I play piano, and I've got perfect pitch. I can hear a song and tell you who it is inside a couple of minutes, usually less. And voices. My husband said something about it just last night. We'll be watching a show and there's an actor we saw in something twenty, thirty years back, and he can't place them, and I've already got it, because I heard the voice, a voice I never heard age a single day in between, and I know exactly who it is. He says I just recognize a voice and know, instantly. He's right, but it doesn't feel like recognizing to me. It feels like the information is already loud. It's just there.

And that feeling, the something-doesn't-sit-right, is the same feeling as the itch, the one that won't let the record stand incomplete. I spent years sure those were two different parts of me, the gift and the compulsion, one I was proud of and one I put up with. They're one part, looked at from two sides. The doctors are only now starting to talk about these three things as one cluster that travels together instead of three separate boxes, and from the inside that tracks, because it never once felt like three things. It felt like being me.

None of this is hard for me to say out loud. I've been telling people true things about myself my whole life, and I've walked out of one closet or another more times than I can count, being a gay man for going on seventy years will do that to a person.

This is just another disclosure.

It costs me nothing to be honest about how my own head works, and it might spare somebody else the years I spent quietly deciding I was just bad at the parts everyone else seemed to find easy.

That's what I want to leave you with. I've written software all my life and loved nearly every minute of it, and my best work was never for a client or a company, it was always the stuff I made for myself. This one is the top of that pile, for two reasons. The first is the fit. I didn't set out to build accommodations, I built good tools, the kind any careful engineer might build, and only later understood they fit my hand because I'd shaped them, without meaning to, around the exact way my brain is bent. The second reason is the one I didn't see coming, because making them is how I found out what that shape even was. I sat down to build a memory and a way to keep my place, and somewhere in the building I got a good look at the thing I'd spent a lifetime quietly working around.

You can't buy that, and you can't buy the fit either. There's no product for the particular shape of your own head, nobody's ever going to ship it, because the market is one person, and half the time that person doesn't know their own shape until they've built the thing that fits it. If you're wired in some way the off-the-shelf stuff never accounted for, and you've got the skill to make the thing yourself, then make the thing. Build it around the bend instead of fighting the bend, and pay attention while you build, because the building is how you learn the shape.

My memory drops things, so I built one that doesn't, and I taught it to remember for me, and the first thing it went and remembered was itself. I'm eating my own dog food, and I love it, and now you know why.