It’s Sunday, and I am captivated by two things simultaneously. On one screen, the eighth rewatch of a television series I have been analyzing scene by scene. On the other, the agentic workspace where I have spent four months immersed in my computer, building and expanding my knowledge of agentic infrastructure. On the easel between them: a white water bottle, black cap, one word lettered by hand in oil. MORE. Block caps, plain, all impact and loud. The bottle is a prop held by Ilya in an opening scene of episode one. He mouths the word in that same scene. Easy to miss if one isn’t watching with intention. I missed it, through four rewatches. I have not looked away since.
The show is Heated Rivalry, a Crave original hockey romance series released in late November 2025. I discovered it the way I discover many things; a pattern caught my attention sideways. And then I went down a rabbit hole.
The first watch was the story. The second was for comprehension. By the third, I had been watching how it was filmed. What I was noticing was more nuanced. Jacob Tierney directs for stillness; he leaves the air where another director would fill it. The dialogue is pared until every line carries weight. Mirroring stages the characters as reflections. Visual and narrative parallels span scenes between them. Callbacks reward the rewatcher. Light and color do narrating that the script doesn’t. Look away and you lose a thread. It is the most intentional piece of art I have studied in years, and precision at that level is, for me, the shape of a problem I cannot leave alone.
Underneath the craft was a quieter recognition. The series films intimacy without the gendered power dynamics I had absorbed as a default, the arrangement where closeness runs on a power difference, and someone has to feel diminished for it to work. What it films instead are two people negotiating intimacy as equals, with male vulnerability as the structure, not the twist. I had not understood how much I had been bracing against the usual arrangement until a story declined to use it.
And then there was Shane.
The show never names what is different about him. It builds him out of kinesics. He folds each piece of clothing as he removes it, drinks only ginger ale, stands with his arms straight at his sides and his hands in his pockets. He rarely goes out, prefers reading in bed, and when he does go out, finds himself a corner for a slight reprieve. He is described as not the most sociable and turns out to be very funny once you are inside the small circle that gets to know him. He is undiagnosed, masking, and performing a public role that demands an ease he cannot manufacture. The series resolves none of it, and the restraint is the whole reason he lands.
I watched him fold his shirt and felt something I had been carrying for decades click into an unrecognized slot. That a person can thrive inside a special interest and never once suspect he is wired differently is not a plot hole. It reads as documentary.
The second screen commanded its own allocation.
At the end of February, I installed Claude Code on my laptop, an agentic command line tool built on an LLM. The hyperfocus engaged the same day. Four months later, it remains engaged. The record:
Three commits in February.
Eighty-three in March.
Two hundred and ten in April.
Two hundred and seventy-four in May.
Seventy-three so far in June.
The shape, when you graph it, is a person going down and not coming up. It started with a small problem solved at the command line. The moment a task repeated, written as a skill. Then an agentic plugin to hold the skills. Then six agentic plugins.
Coach Ilya, my strength coach, periodized Olympic lifting for me and my twin sister, equipment-aware, calibration-aware, sessions delivered by email before either of us is awake.
The Social Content Engine reads the cultural calendar and niche trends, matches them to specific paintings, and stages a week of platform-native posts across six accounts.
Liminal Art Studio, the pipeline carrying this very dispatch from drafts into your inbox, with its voice-router and per-platform skills and its own art-interpreter for painting-grounded prose.
Digital Shell, with Shelli² underneath it, a knowledge base that reads my own raw material back to me and writes the wiki it needs so the next session starts smarter than the last.
An assistant for a registered investment advisor.
Webflow-dev for the website builds.
I woke up two hours earlier one morning because I had all the thoughts.
Twenty-six skills. Thirty commands. Ten shell hooks that block credential reads, scan output for leaked secrets, commit my work while I sleep. Seven scheduled cloud workflows, decoupled execution running on remote runtimes. 645 commits total. The Social Content Engine alone accounts for 177.
I pushed Claude Code too hard one day. One agent tapped out.
Underneath these metrics is the architecture. Five layers, each going down into the one beneath it, the same dependency chain under each solution. At the bottom, the Harness: shared infrastructure, the part Claude Code keeps shipping. Above it, the Construct: a contract for what each plugin does, what it costs, how it fails. Above that, intra-workspace events: how the plugins coordinate work. Above that, Paperclip: roles, budgets, the org chart that operates the workspace as a company. On top, agent-to-agent: where my agents will communicate and collaborate with other people’s agents.
This is what agentic coding infrastructure looks like for one operator. Six solutions, one architecture. As they ship, the whole workspace lifts. The infrastructure is infrastructure; what compounds is what I build on top.
Curiosity that doesn’t leave anything behind is just consumption. Mine left evidence.
The same fixation as the eighth rewatch of Heated Rivalry, the refusal to surface until I have seen every chamber.
More is not a quantity. It’s a direction I keep facing.
Dance was one of those directions. I had avoided it my entire life because being bad at something in public is the exact texture I like to avoid. The show rewired that. It showed me two people refusing to disappear inside the version they had to perform. I didn’t want it to be a regret. So I started. In my apartment. Badly. A Heated Rivalry-themed rave was announced in my city, in a venue connected to my apartment’s parking lot. No excuses were remaining.
It would be my first rave. Of course, I wouldn’t be good at dancing, but I went, alone, and I danced in a room of strangers who loved what I loved. None of it belonged to the person I have spent my life masking. That is exactly why it mattered.
The pattern is older than the show. What the show did was give it a name. The college engineer who hacked the DOS menu in the early 1990’s so the project managers could launch Windows without an extra command. The motorcycle racer who picked 842 in 2001 because each position in binary-coded decimal weighs 8, 4, 2, 1, and the first three of those weights were the nerdiest race number to put on a bike. The final years through 2020 walking beside a deaf horse, refining communication without voice. The painter who emerged. None were left behind. They are evidence of a lifelong habit of going down a rabbit hole into a thing until I understand every part of it.
If you watch a show eight times to find the wiring underneath, and the wiring turns out to be you, what exactly have you been studying?
Still going back. Still down the rabbit hole. Still lettering MORE.
Thank you for being in this small orbit that receives the long version about my work. I try to make a newsletter that’s worthy of your time while I continue to find my voice.