Writing

This site has a feed

The site moved to blog.nhade.com in May but kept pointing at its old address. Fixed, and there is an RSS feed.

Better Charts From AI Tools: A Starting-Point Workflow

I'm not a data viz expert. Here are the prompt additions I use to get chart output past vanilla matplotlib, plus a recent experiment aligning visuals to my blog's style.

Cairo's principles, chart-junk removal, data-ink ratio, no y-axis truncation, plus a recent experiment aligning visuals to a design document. The prompt-side workflow I've been using for AI-assisted charts.

Off the Free Tier: Rebuilding on Hetzner + Cloudflare

AWS EC2's free credits ran out. Here's the choice tree I walked, and the €4/mo stack I landed on.

EC2 free credits expired. Singapore latency wasn't actually the bottleneck. I picked a €4.79/mo Hetzner CX23 with Cloudflare DNS + Pages in front, and here's the decision tree.

Shiori: Building a Personal RAG over Mistakes, Not Textbooks

Why retrieval over textbook grammar is mostly noise, and what works instead — embedding the learner's own history of wrong answers.

I almost built a RAG system over Japanese textbook content. After thinking about it honestly, I built one over the learner's own mistakes instead — and measured whether it actually does anything useful.

Anti-Copilot: Building a Socratic AI Tutor from Scratch

Rethinking AI assistants by engineering a VS Code extension that uses spaced repetition to teach concepts instead of just autocompleting code.

A VS Code extension and learning system that replaces AI autocomplete with spaced repetition and Socratic hints to help students actually learn.

Building Ray's Lab

Why I built this site, why I didn't write a single line of code, and what I learned from handing everything to AI agents.

A site born out of low visibility, built entirely by AI agents as a deliberate experiment in a new way of working.