Recent Field NotesView all →
#024

I have been doing agentic engineering this whole time. Sort of.

Andrej Karpathy drew a line between vibe coding and agentic engineering. Here is why that distinction matters, where I land, and what it means for the software we build.

ObservingMay 10, 2026
#023

I built an agent that researches AI news for me while I sleep.

Claude Managed Agents, a Memory Store, and one email in my inbox every few days. Here is why I built it and what I want it to become.

BuildingMay 9, 2026
#022

I refused to believe Claude Code got worse. It had.

Plus Mythos Preview, Claude Design, Managed Agents memory, and the Vercel breach. A running log of three weeks I did not post.

ObservingApr 26, 2026
#021

Andrej Karpathy published LLM Wiki. Here is why I think RAG still makes sense for some things.

A pattern that went viral in April 2026. My instinct is that RAG and LLM Wiki solve different problems. I shared that thought on X and the conversation was interesting.

ObservingApr 7, 2026
#020

Contentful webhooks mean I never push to Supabase manually. Claude Code wrote it in 15 minutes.

The RAG search index now updates itself every time I publish a Field Note. One endpoint, one webhook, done.

BuildingApr 6, 2026
#019

I built RAG search on a headless CMS. The CMS did more work than the vector database.

Semantic search is live on fieldnotes-ai.com. Voyage AI, Supabase pgvector, Claude Sonnet. But the interesting part is what Contentful contributed.

BuildingApr 5, 2026
#018

I haven’t built AI search yet. But I already found what would have broken it.

While preparing to build RAG search for fieldnotes-ai.com, I audited 17 Field Notes and found 84 headings written as plain paragraphs. Claude Code fixed all via Contentful MCP.

LearningApr 3, 2026
#017

I'm adding search to this site. It will understand what you mean, not just what you typed.

I'm building RAG-powered semantic search for fieldnotes-ai.com. Before writing any code, here's the two-pipeline architecture and every decision behind it.

LearningApr 2, 2026
#016

Supabase emailed me at 9 PM. All my tables were publicly accessible.

I shipped a production app with Row Level Security disabled. Anyone with my project URL could read, edit, and delete everything. I didn't notice. Supabase did.

ObservingMar 31, 2026
#015

I set up a custom email domain in three minutes. In 2010 this took me a day.

digest@fieldnotes-ai.com is sending. DKIM verified. SPF verified. I added one DNS record and Resend handled the rest.

BuildingMar 27, 2026
#014

I spent a day building a system that replaces two hours of Reddit scrolling every morning.

It runs at 8 AM. I didn't write the architecture. I didn't pick the tools. I described the problem and Claude.ai figured out the rest.

BuildingMar 25, 2026
#013

Claude Code has an unreleased feature called Auto-dream. I found it, I can't use it, and I think that's fine.

Claude Code is building a memory consolidation system modeled on human sleep. It's not available yet. Here's what it does and why I'm not waiting.

ObservingMar 24, 2026
#012

Next.js shipped an update specifically for AI agents. I upgraded in one session. Here's what actually changed.

Next.js 16.2 dropped March 18. The release is titled "AI Improvements." I had it running on fieldnotes-ai.com by March 23. Five days late is still timely enough.

BuildingMar 23, 2026
#011

My site was invisible to AI. Six fixes, one afternoon.

Google could see my articles. It could not confirm I wrote them. Perplexity had no idea who I was. One Claude Code session changed both.

BuildingMar 20, 2026
#010

I rebuilt this entire site without writing a single line of code. Here's what $41 and 65 million tokens bought.

I uploaded mockups, described the stack, and watched Claude.ai plan a 31-step redesign. Claude Code executed it. Vercel deployed it. I was the human in the loop.

BuildingMar 17, 2026
#009

Everything I learned from Anthropic's course. And how I'll use it when I redesign this site

I finished the course. Here's every trick I'll use when I redesign this site. And what I'll protect this time.

LearningMar 14, 2026
#008

Anthropic's own course taught me things I didn't know. One of them no longer existed.

A few weeks in, I took Anthropic's official Claude Code course. It was excellent. One feature it taught was already deprecated. Nobody is exempt from the pace — not even the people shipping the tools

LearningMar 11, 2026
#007

My sitemap said Success. Google said it had never heard of my pages.

Three days of waiting for indexing that was never going to happen. One missing www was the reason.

LearningMar 9, 2026
#006

Claude Code silently committed my Contentful Management Token to git history through an MCP config file.

GitGuardian caught what Claude Code didn't. Here's exactly how an MCP config file caused it and what I do differently now.

ObservingMar 7, 2026
#005

My site was invisible to search engines. Here is every SEO fix I shipped in one session.

robots.txt was missing. The homepage had no metadata. The OG image 404'd after what looked like a clean deploy

BuildingMar 5, 2026
#004

I spent a day researching SEO instead of shipping code. Here's why that was the right call.

robots.txt: 404. Sitemap: pointing to a domain I don't own. AI crawlers: couldn't see me. I stopped shipping code and spent a day reading documentation. Best decision all week.

LearningMar 4, 2026
#003

I fixed 9 things on fieldnotes-ai.com in an hour. Half of them didn't need a single line of code.

Lists weren't rendering. Social links were hardcoded. The nav had a page nobody needed. Claude Code fixed the code. Contentful fixed the rest. Total cost: $6.82.

BuildingMar 3, 2026
#002

I deployed fieldnotes-ai.com. Here's everything that broke along the way.

v0 built the site in 5 minutes. Claude went down for 4 hours. Vercel deployed and provisioned SSL like magic. Total cost: $2.70.

BuildingMar 2, 2026
#001

I set up a Contentful space using Claude Code and MCP. Here’s what I learned in 45 minutes.

Zero UI clicks. Claude Code talked to Contentful through MCP and built six content types in 45 minutes. Cost $1.77.

LearningMar 1, 2026
My Tools
Nika Karliuchenko is a content infrastructure specialist exploring the intersection of structured content and artificial intelligence. Based in Boston, she documents her experiments and observations in this field journal.