Posts on Golden Hex

Binary vs JSON for MCP: I Went Looking

Sat, 30 May 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Protobuf beats JSON on CPU and memory. Apache TinkerPop’s GraphBinary, same story over GraphSON - I’m living that migration at work, and we’re already seeing memory pressure ease. The tradeoff is old: text is readable but costs CPU and bytes, and past a certain payload size that cost outweighs the convenience.

I wanted to go looking for that. My first thought was the Language Server Protocol - but LSP is a decade old: settled, widely shipped, and with little appetite for changing the bytes on its wire.

Learning Jujutsu by Teaching It

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

More than a decade ago, I switched workplaces and ecosystems. Gone was the Microsoft stack I knew, and in its place: Linux, open source, and this thing called Git that everyone swore by but nobody could explain clearly.

A colleague shared learngitbranching.js.org. It was a revelation. Instead of reading documentation or watching tutorials, I could play with branching, see the DAG update in real time, and build intuition through experimentation. To this day, I credit that tool for how I think about Git.

Hash Devlog: Setting Up for Daily Driving

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Hash for development, but switching between go build outputs and keeping track of versions was getting old. If I’m going to use this as my daily shell, I need proper infrastructure: versioned builds, easy upgrades, and a fast way to report bugs when things break.

This devlog covers three pieces: version injection with dual VCS support, Homebrew distribution via a personal tap, and a new issue builtin that makes bug reports trivially easy.

Hash Devlog: Tracing the Missing Keystrokes

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I was building ghost text for Hash, an AI-powered shell. Instead of blocking while the agent thinks, ghost text streams dimmed suggestions inline as tokens arrive - like Copilot, but for shell commands. The feature worked, but something was wrong with input handling. Press Enter to accept a suggestion: nothing. Press again: nothing. Third time: finally works.

Same with Ctrl+D to exit. One press, two presses, three presses, finally exits. Intermittent. Frustrating. Impossible to reproduce reliably.

Introducing Hash: Building an Agentic Shell

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

I wanted the speed and multiline editor capabilities of Warp, the keybindings of Helix, and the freedom of open source—all inside my existing terminal.

Meet Hash (Harness Assisted SHell). It’s a Go-based shell designed for editor-style navigation with agent-agnostic AI built in. In true 2026 fashion, this is a heavily vibe-coded project with Claude doing most of the heavy lifting.

The Magic Syntax: `??`

The ?? operator is the heart of Hash. Drop it anywhere in a command:

Schema Validation for FluxCD HelmRelease Files

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

If you’re using FluxCD to manage Helm releases, you’ve likely debugged a failed deployment caused by a typo in your values block. Maybe you wrote replicas instead of replicaCount, or nested an option one level too deep. These mistakes are easy to make and hard to catch-often you don’t discover them until Flux fails to reconcile.

The fix? Bring the same LSP-powered autocomplete and validation you use for application code to your HelmRelease files.