Build & Defend Newsletter 11

One email a week - something from which I hope you'll get real value. We talk about things we can build, and how to defend them. That can apply to cybersecurity, physical buildings, digital products, and .... just about anything. It gives me a lot of latitude in what I can write about, but the two concepts are important for progress - as individuals, and as society.

Today's topic is: software.

Before that - what happened to issue number 10? Well, it would appear that I can't count. I think somewhere around newsletter 6 I forgot to put in the number, so 7 went out as 6, 8 as 7, etc. I'm correcting that. Thankfully Beehiiv (the software I use for the newsletter) keeps track of your writing streak. This one will also be a day late on my artificially imposed schedule. Life is busy.

When I was a boy of about 10 or 11 (roughly the age my son is now), in BASIC on an IBM PC xt (yes, I'm that old) I made a program which output to the screen a hand with a finger pointing at the viewer that said "Quinlan Software: We Write Software for YOU!". It was a red background, and the hand was yellow, as was the writing, off to the side. It was all ASCII. Software writing is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I may have mentioned it before.

🔨 BUILD: Software

There is literally no reason you can't build software anymore, short of not having access to a computer. My first app, Battery Lens, I did mostly on a train with an early version of ChatGPT. When I went to update it later on an early version of Claude Code, Claude essentially said "C'est quoi cette merde?" He straightened some things out. Then I went back to ChatGPT for a while and my OpenClaw suggested more features. Then a later version of Claude Code, slightly less French but also as annoyed, sighed very heavily, flipped his beret to the other side of his head, and made it better and correct.

I'm writing another software right now. The builds are building in Github. (Sadly, Gitlab doesn't have the "runners" necessary for all OSes but Github does. (I've been versioning it in Gitlab though the entire time.) This way I also get it backed up in two git systems. Redundancy ftw!) Claude Code is remarkable at writing code, and even if my software never sells, it's something that I want to use: a replacement for an older piece of software a company bought and stopped maintaining. I've taken that whole feature set, also run it through OpenClaw, and asked it to update it with more features, which I also added in, and now it's the software that that other one would have been had it not been consigned to the dustbin of history. It's writing in a language that didn't exist five years ago, which I don't know (and which it technically doesn't know either, which is the really ironic part) and it's making it cross-platform for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

What does it look like to do this? In the terminal, I switch to a directory in which I want to work:

cd Desktop/softwarename

claude

Then claude comes up. (I'll use Codex in the future once my Claude subscription ends at the end of the month.) Then I simply tell it what I want. It does it. You can ask it to run the application, and it will. Then you can test it.

The cool part is - if there are functions that are exposed via API (application programming interface) or MCP (Model Context Protocol) then you can spin up another terminal and ALSO ask claude to test it! So at one point I had claude writing code in one tab and claude testing that code in another! (Not at the same time, that would be messy.)

Tonight I have claude building the various builds for different OSes (dmg for Mac, msi for Windows, and rpm, deb, and AppImage for Linux):

It asked me if I wanted to do this. Yes, yes I did.

It’s tough to see, but the build failed for one of the OSes. It’s figured out the problem and is enabling the fix.

while Talos is building me a backend licensing server I'll use for my software as well as an app my wife is building with vibecode.dev. How crazy is all that? To think that we could have done anything remotely similarly amazing even just three years ago is unthinkable. Talos connected to Hetzner, figured out the type of VM necessary, installed docker, installed the software, configured it, asked me to create a DNS A record (which I did), and then confirmed it worked. He's now - as I write this - building the licensing piece and a dashboard.

For everything Talos is doing it's just a conversation in Telegram.

Technically most of this was done while I was asleep.

(Also, an AI made the website for quinlan.software, too.)

🛡️ DEFEND: Software (Also, Hardware)

Did you know that you computer can tell people - and software - all sorts of things about you? For example, I didn't know until I started researching into batteries, but your battery tells stalkerware and potentially other people all sorts of things about you. How often and to where you might be traveling. Whether you charge frequently, overnight, to what percentages you let it get to, whether you go all the way to 100% .... it can reveal all sorts of interesting things. (Google "what your battery says about you" if you want some interesting takes.) Your employer can technically use that information from a corporate device if they wanted. (Other software platforms, like Zoom, used to give administrators the capability as a feature to be able to tell which users were actually paying attention in meetings, for example. They've taken it out now, but ....) There are all sorts of things we need to be aware of when it comes to cybersecurity, but we also need to be aware that the devices that we use, and the software that we use, also collects information about us. That's why we get such interesting ads, and don't even get me started on your microphone and camera.... you should be covering your camera while not using it!

Speaking of defence, you should always have contingency plans for hardware and software. It's been a giant pain converting all my OpenClaws back to ChatGPT from Claude since Anthropic made the (in my opinion) colossally stupid decision to make it so that people paying them $200+ per month would want to stop. Hardware is easy to make redundant for the most part; software is a bit trickier. Of course, these days, as mentioned in "BUILD" above, it can be much easier.

💰 STACK: Software (Also, Hardware)

If you've been paying any attention lately, you'll know that the race is on for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). Companies are putting data centres in space. Energy companies are skipping the grid entirely and installing where customers have need. Jet companies are repurposing turbines for electricity generation. You'll need your own local everything soon, not for any prepper reasons (though I did mention you should have your WIFE in order in a previous newsletter for that very reason) but because you'll have control over it. You don't have to stack software from a cloud company like OpenAI if you are running local LLMs on your own hardware. Build it, defend it, and stack it - make it yours, maybe make some money along the way if other people find it useful, but have control of the things that you find useful because it will be very difficult later if you don't do it now.

🔗 LINKS

What Your Battery Says About You

💬 ONE THING

Passive income still around $325 per month.... hopefully I'll announce some more things shortly as I'm putting the very last touches on them!