A Good Start

For day 2, I began my day by a kind soul saying they’d pay for my brakes to be fixed on the car. I thought the car would maybe be towed, and it wasn’t drivable (safely). That was at 7am. The library’s hours were 9am to 9pm. So, after dropping the car off, I actually went to a nearby church that was open (opened at 830am, went there before the library) to see if they’d be willing to let me do some work there. I figured I’d potentially be in a better environment to focus. They said no, so, I headed on over to the library.

I filmed this video in the church parking lot after told it wasn’t open to the public:

The Work

There, I continued mapping out my problem space. I gathered up a bunch of context from @doodlestein on x.com. I settled on using the built in Grok, expert mode, with the prompt (and slight variations):

“Hello there. I’d like you to gather for me a bunch of information from @doodlestein user here on x. I am specifically interested in the planning process, beads conversion from a plan/spec, and project structure. Here is the following I currently have in a GDoc: “ORIGINAL PARAGRAPH (not from Jeffrey): A clean-room PDF renderer/generator. PDF is the de facto document interchange format, and the existing implementations (Poppler, MuPDF, the various Java/Python libraries) are all either C/C++ with decades of CVEs or painfully slow. A correct, memory-safe, fast PDF engine would be used everywhere from browsers to enterprise document pipelines. — ADVICE FROM JEFFREY: Show Claude my spec for frankentui and tell it to make one like it for pdf. Get a complete open source pdf renderer/generator in typescript as reference Make it in rust — Now, my goal: Create the world’s best and most performant, memory-safe Rust PDF Ren./Gen. A blog post will be created for it: “How I took a bunch of donated Claude passes and turned it into the world’s best and most performant, memory-safe Rust PDF renderer and generator” Importantly, utilizing AI Agents in the entire ideation, planning, implementation, testing, etc. progress will be paramount. I, the human, essentially will act as a thought partner with the ideation, and then an orchestrator with planning, and a very distant manager during the implementation/testing - for impl/test, the coding system itself will be catered to a closed-loop style, the idea is for me, the human, to not be a bottleneck on the AI Agent productivity - but, that will come later on after the ideation/planning phase. It’s important to consider the new agent capabilities that are at our disposal: this project is indeed very ambitious, but the goal here is to show just what is possible with the new AI coding agents, and astonishingly, at such a fast rate, by a literal homeless man in a public library, taking only days to produce (Yes, this is ENTIRELY realistic).” But, first, let’s understand the need for this new Rust implementation of a pdf ren/gen, and how such a robust implementation can be had given the new agentic capabilities. This will also be used to tie in somewhere for the blog portion - So, I can actually also start literally writing the blog post as well - I have another tab open in the GDoc called “Blog Post” Like I said, we need to emphasize his ‘talkings’ on planning, repo initialization/structure, conversion of some ‘plan’ (file or multiple files - and, I know I’d use automated reviewer pro in the process given the complexity), and then also hearing his process on the beads conversion process. These are great resources https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2014182649955266882 Planning related X posts:https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2007588870662107197?s=20https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2008813776687030781?s=20https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2008683457715548549?s=20https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2004650413484658735?s=20https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1997777154612797787?s=20 I would like you to return a file that contains the relevant information that I can use. I want you to get every single prompt he posted, verbatim, and annotate how I could utilize them.”

I got about 5 of those badboys out, then sent it into gpt5.2 pro to consolidate them into a single file, but then did a few ‘critique rounds’ on it with the hope to make the information more useful.

The Car

I eventually picked my car up, and that was fantastic - I truly felt such a large amount of hype. Having this functional car back has opened a lot of opportunities to me now.

I went to another bigger, quiet library to finish out the day (up to 9pm).

After Hours

Then drove tried to get into an ihop and a dennys for their free wifi to continue work a bit longer, but they were both closed (ihop was takeout only 24/7, and the dennys was going on with maintenance). I began driving to another, but figured it was better to get sleep at that point and get after it tomorrow. It may have been a situation where I’m just staring at the screen in a haze. Also, I would have gotten something cheap for like $2 so I wouldn’t be loitering.

I also did gpt 5.2 deep research on finding me options around my city, which is what even gave me the 24/7 diner ideas to be able to continue my work.

Anyways, found a parking lot (I was confident they didn’t tow) and sleeping in 50 degrees vs. 30 was relatively fantastic.

What I Learned

  • Research and context-gathering IS the work right now. Mapping Jeffrey’s planning methodology and figuring out how to apply it to the PDF engine is directly productive, even though no code was written.
  • The car changes the game. Mobility means optionality — different libraries, extended hours possibilities, better sleep spots.
  • Know when to stop — but also know that it’s absolutely important that I go balls to the wall. It absolutely must become habit to keep working after the library closes and even before it opens. The hours vary on Fridays and weekends. Two nights in a row I’ve hit the wall. The discipline isn’t just in pushing through — it’s in recognizing when more screen time is just diminishing returns and sleep is the force multiplier.

Day 2 of the journey. Still in the research and planning phase. No code yet — and that’s by design.