I started yesterday with a half-baked translation of my autobiography. And in just one day:
- A full day at work as Dualog’s Infrastructure Manager, with a pile of improvements to Dualog Insight.
- The translation done, and Nineteen Eighty-Four out in English on a revamped isene.org.
- alchemy: a chemistry bench in the terminal.
- ferrite: an SQL database in memory. Reads four times as fast as SQLite.
- gaze: a browser. Firefox is gone from my machine.
That’s one day. It’s bonkers. It’s the era of AI.
The last piece
Everything on my desktop, from the X server up, is written in pure assembly. That is CHasm: the display server, the window manager, the terminal, the shell, the bar, the lock screen. Every program I use is written in Rust. That is Fe₂O₃: mail, calendar, editor, file manager, PDF reader, music, the lot.
One piece was left. The browser. I didn’t think I could replace it. A browser is a monster… nobody writes one in a day. Nobody has to. The engine is WebKit, the same engine as in Safari, and it is a library on my machine. gaze is the shell around it, the way qutebrowser is a shell around Chromium. That shell is 3,500 lines of Rust.
gaze
Vim keys. f and two letters follows a link. o opens the pages I was at last, and typing narrows them. Tabs group, fold and come back at the next start, the way Firefox does it, with my own colours. Logins live in one sealed file and fill a login page when it loads. Ads and trackers are blocked from a hosts list. Every key is a command, and :bind changes one.
My Firefox tabs, bookmarks and logins moved over. It is my default browser now.
The first version took an hour. The rest of the night went to tab groups, passwords, ad blocking, and the things you only notice when you use it. Three times the browser died under me… the test scripts killed every process called gaze, mine included. Stuff like that.
Summary
Built with Claude. I say what I want, it builds, I test, we go again. One day: a book, a chemistry set, a database, a browser. And a full day of work.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/One-Day.html