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Thomas Letan
lthms · he/him

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What Happened in January 2026?

This is my first retrospective in quite a while—I have yet to make writing these logs a real habit of mine. That being the case, so much happened this month that this article felt like the obvious thing to do.

tinkerbell’s First Month

On January 5th, I published my account of migrating my website to a completely new setup. Not only am I very proud of this article in and of itself, I am also quite happy that it has sparked discussions in a few places such as lobste.rs  or the orange website . It has also been shared in other places like the DevOps’ish newsletter I have also created a GitHub repository  to host tinkerbell configuration, and it is quietly farming stars as we speak. .

I don’t write articles with the expectation that they reach a large audience, but I will admit I had some ambitions for this one. It’s very fulfilling to know my experiment report of sorts has caught the attention of my peers, if only a little.

At first, I thought I would spend January experimenting with my new playground. I have a handful of services I want to deploy. Little did I know I would be sidetracked sharply before I had a chance to get to it.

Meeting with Claude Code

Somehow, I have managed to go through 2025 while staying afar from the code agent hype. I gave “vibecoding” a try in May by chatting with ChatGPT and Gemini while yak shaving my way towards transcribing YouTube videos in OCaml. Even I realized back then that the hype had already moved on from chat UI towards agents.

Then, the craziest thing happened. I went on holidays on December 23rd, 2025. Two weeks later, as I was going back to $WORK, Claude Code and its ilk suddenly felt inevitable. It looks like agentic workflows got very good in a matter of a few weeks, up to a point where there is a real opportunity cost in ignoring them altogether. And as I am about to take out a mortgage, it feels like a bad time to take the risk of falling out of relevance.

Looking back, I think it started with a simple, genuine suggestion—we were discussing a fairly ambitious clean-up of our test-suite at $WORK when someone mentioned Claude Code was quite relevant for this kind of tedious, boilerplate-heavy task. This resonated with all the success stories I was suddenly exposed to. Before I could realize what was happening, I was caught up in an intense introspective journey.

Part of my answer to the angst of LLMs being on the verge of reshaping the way I work is CeCe CeCe being a nickname for Claude Code (CC). .

CeCe is a Claude Code plugin I have been working Claude Code and I have been working on for the better part of the month, and it has become my sandbox to experiment with and understand agentic workflows. I don’t know if I impair the agent with it: Opus 4.5 is impressive out of the box. What if all the prompting I inject with CeCe prevents me from getting the user experience intended for me by Anthropic? Only time will tell, but that’s how I click. Not by adopting a tool, but by experimenting with it, tweaking it, and refining the way I use it day after day until I find a fixpoint of sorts where I am comfortable. In this case, configuring Claude Code in a very opinionated way feels like a good way to “protect” my agency.

New RSS Feeds

On a final note, I am glad to say that this website now features some new RSS feeds that you may be interested inThat’s actually the very first task I entrusted to Claude Code. Suffice it to say, it didn't blink, and navigated through my quite unusual setup like a champ. : one per tags, and one per series. I have been meaning to implement them since I’ve added my website to a certain aggregator that now advertises every article I publish that cites one particular programming language.

I am glad to know that camel aficionados learnt about my tinkerbell setup simply because I drew a parallel between infrastructure as code and functional programming. Maybe they don’t share my enthusiasm, though. With this change, I am one PR away from limiting this aggregator’s scope to simply the articles featuring the appropriate tag. I think they will find it useful. Maybe you will too!