Hello friends!! I've got some exciting announcements in the form of updates, services, and products.

What do I mean by Service?

A service is a platform a user can signup for, pay a set fee, then receive something in return. This can be as expansive as an entire website (see GroveEngine), or as simple as 5 products searched online.

New stuff

Okay!! enough boring banter. Lets talk about the real deal. What have I been working on?

The first is a service you are already familiar with, the GroveEngine. This is a service where users can signup for a personal blog and share ideas/thoughts/whatever with their friends.
The second is GroveScout. This service will search across multiple retailers like Amazon, Walmart, etc. to reduce shopping overwhelm for users and provide simple, digestible, results.
Next up I have the GroveDomainTool. This is yet another agentic searching tool but specifically for domain names and availability. I use this internally when helping clients migrate from .grove.place -> personal domains.

The next two services are currently under construction and will not be publicly accessibly for a bit while I develop them further.

GroveMusic is a tool users can signup for to get curated and personalized playlists based on seed tracks, artists, or albums. Creates a ~15 song list with a weighted average of obvious picks, deep cuts, and hidden gems.
GroveSearch is another agentic tool for searching the web and getting fully in depth answers while maintaining factual completeness.

Enough grove updates, what have I been up to?

well, this will be a bit obvious and a bit on the nose, but lots and lots of development. If you browse my Timeline page you can see each days work, then broken down into specific projects.

Outside of that, I've been reading a lot more of Haruki Murakami's works. Specifically, Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind Up Bird Chronicles. The first is a bit surprising for me, as normally, Murakami can't write women ... at all. But this book? Pleasantly surprised me with its descriptions. The later I've been reading through for the better part of 2 months.

I recently saw the movie Now You see Me, now you Dont and enjoyed it. Would recommend, but it still includes lots of cheesy wizard magic that isn't realistic at all (see a funny video about that specifically Here).

Sonically, I've been enjoying the album Luv 4 Rent by Smino and You by Larry Lovestein & The Velvet Revival (Mac miller). The former came out not too long ago, and I saw the album performed live on his tour with Jid, called LUV IS 4EVER. The later came out over a decade ago, and is the only album Mac released under that name. Its a short and sweet jazzy affair, and I highly recommend it.

Development wise (and this will be a bit technical, skip ahead if you're not interested in Coding), I've become particularly enamored by the recently released Deepseek v3.2 model due to its price and excellent performance. I've also started using Kilo Code, a similar agent to something like Cursor but its open source and very easy to use, and doesn't require an entire separate IDE, instead installing within an extension. I'm experimenting with using Kilo more full time, as my usage of Claude Code continues to drain my wallet (an example task, ~20 tool calls with ~60k tokens of context will cost deepseek ~0.03$. Claude code is ~2$ for the same task)

Kilo doesn't fully compare to Claude Code, Anthropic is really cooking right now, but its closing the gap. I'm also experimenting with enabling other models to be used within claude code itself (like deepseek) via the Claude Code Router project.

Links

I'd like to start a section at the end of each blog post where I share what I've been reading online, rapid fire as to not overwhelm you with lore.

(Dec 2nd) The Verge - It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything (link, paywall)
(Dec 2nd) Claude Soul document. Seems that Anthropic has very specific ideas about what Claude is (link)
(Dec 2nd) Strudel, an IDE for creating music. Just try out this example song. Its so cool. (Link)
(Dec 3rd) Everyone in Seattle Hates AI (Link)
(Dec 3rd) PCWorld - RAM is so expensive Samsung won't even sell to itself (Link)
(Dec 4th) Programming Peaked (Link). A deep dive into why AI coding can actually be useful and how much the coding landscape has changed.
(Dec 4th) The Verge - Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts (Link, paywalled)
(Dec 6th) Youtube - How to live in an Absurdly Small space (Link)
(Dec 7th) The Verge - Starlink made work from home, anywhere, possible (Link)