hallelx2 labs Writing · Published on X

Writing

Ten pieces I cared enough about to write at length, and publish under my own name.

10articles published on X, the most recent on 18 September 2026

16,000+reads across them, the floor of X’s own figures on 22 September 2026

0of them written to a brief — each one started as something I had to work out

01The arguments Each opens on X, where it was published.

Citation Needs Coordinates — Why I Wrote a PDF Engine in GoA pure-Go PDF structure engine, because the retrieval engine above it had to point at the pixels an answer came from. The ICDAR benchmarks, the metric I had been reporting wrongly for months, and the negative result I like most.18 September 2026524 reads What Matters then?A claim that will annoy people, earned rather than asserted: choosing a language or a stack has mostly stopped mattering. Not entirely — mostly, and in a specific way worth being precise about.11 September 20261K reads Your Admin Workflow Needs an MCP Server, Not Another DashboardOpening a dashboard should be occasional. For most solo builders it is constant, and every time it costs a context switch the real work then has to recover from. The alternative is a tool surface an agent can drive.11 September 20261.5K reads T3 Code Is the Future of HarnessesMost people writing code with AI now have several of these tools, and almost nobody has asked why they are personally doing the routing between them — expressing that knowledge by moving their body between terminal tabs.9 September 2026915 reads Sometimes, Cloudflare Is All You NeedIn 2017 some researchers argued that attention is all you need. In software, attention is the only currency you actually spend — money you can raise, time you can borrow, attention you can only divide.8 September 20261.7K reads Mercala — A Store You Run by Talking to ItEvery platform is going agentic, ecommerce included — Shopify shipped an admin assistant and an MCP server with it. Three months ago I decided to learn Java, and did it by building the agentic store I had been turning over for a while.7 September 20263.9K reads How I Moved a Live Telegram Bot Off AWS in Six SecondsThe bot was down for about six seconds. A student answering questions at three in the morning saw a 78-second gap against her own median of 69. What made that cheap — and the firewall rule that cost fifteen minutes.2 September 20261.1K reads Your Browser Is the TunnelHow a LangSmith tracing quirk became BridgeHook — a webhook tunnel on a Cloudflare Worker, two Durable Objects, a Chrome extension and a Neon database — and what Chrome’s security rulebook did to the plan.26 August 20261.5K reads How I Marketed a Free Study Bot From Inside Its Own CodeFour dated changes to how it asks for support, what the database says each one was worth, and the conversion rate I nearly published that was really just two small numbers standing next to each other.25 August 20261K reads How I Used Bachs + a Cloudflare Worker to Orchestrate a Payment Gateway in My Telegram BotA checkout session dies in an hour and a chat message lives forever. That mismatch is the whole story: why the gateway moved out of the bot, how the Worker is secured, and the hole I found in my own design.25 August 20262.9K reads

02Why these and not a blog

Each of these started the same way: something I had built forced me to work out an argument, and the argument turned out to be longer than a post. The pdfgrab piece exists because a retrieval engine needed to point at pixels and no Go library could do it. The Cloudflare one because I kept noticing that the bill is not the only thing a service charges you.

They live on X rather than here because that is where the readers and the argument actually happen — the replies are half the point. This page is the index; the reach numbers are X’s own, read on 22 September 2026, and rounded the way X rounds them.

03How they get made The same loop as the code, with a different output.

From a built thing to a published argument

I do not write to a brief. The thing gets built, and then it owes an explanation.

build itand hit the problem

work out whythe argument

figures, not screenshotsdrawn in tokens

publishunder my own name

The figures in these articles are built the same way this site is — HTML and a token file, rendered to images, rather than screenshots of a diagram tool. That is why the charts in the pdfgrab piece and the boxes on this site look related: they come from the same stylesheet.

The writing is downstream of the building.

Every one of these came out of a repository on this site. If an argument here interests you, the thing it is about is one click away.

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