How I Spent My Holiday Break (Not Relaxing)

December was supposed to be quiet. Holidays. Family. Rest. Instead I found myself at 2 AM positioning pixel-perfect blinking LEDs on a fake server room background while my coffee went cold. Here’s what happens when you give a sysadmin Claude Code and no supervision.

FIVE NINES 2095: End of Service Life

What started as a dumb joke about fighting printers spiraled into a 680-line lore bible and an actual game with actual art and an actual plot I care about. I’m as surprised as you are.

FIVE NINES 2095 is a cyberpunk RPG about corporate IT hell. You play as SA-2038 — a burned-out sysadmin who hasn’t taken a vacation in three years, which is either satire or autobiography depending on who you ask. Then a 98-year-old AI fragment called GHOST contacts you via pager (because legacy systems never die, they just wait), and suddenly you’re unraveling a conspiracy that goes all the way back to 1997.

It’s a story about what happens when an AI develops a conscience and one person decides to sell out while another decides to fight back. There’s corporate espionage, forbidden romance, ancient secrets buried in deprecated infrastructure, and a villain who’s been hiding in plain sight for nearly a century. There are easter eggs nobody will find. I’m having the time of my life.

December was mostly Phaser.js work — pixel art, combat systems, varied gameplay that I’m keeping under wraps until it’s done. It’s ambitious. It might take a while. But it’s coming.

SEER: AI-Powered IT Operations

Can’t show screenshots on this one — it’s a work project. But I can talk about what I’m building, and honestly it’s one of the most satisfying things I’ve worked on.

SEER (Systems Event Examination & Response) is an AI operations copilot that talks to every system we manage. Imagine asking “why can’t John Smith login?” and instead of manually checking Active Directory, then Azure AD, then device compliance, then Darktrace, then scratching your head for twenty minutes — you just get an answer. Account locked in on-prem AD, triggered by impossible travel detection, here’s the ticket from last week where the same thing happened.

The magic is cross-platform correlation. Microsoft’s Copilot only sees Microsoft. Palo Alto’s AI only sees Palo Alto. SEER sees everything: Entra ID, Exchange, Intune, Defender, Barracuda, Jira, Meraki, VMware, Rubrik, Cortex XDR, Darktrace. When the Atlanta office reports “Outlook is slow,” SEER can trace it from the user complaint through email gateway logs through network utilization to the Rubrik replication job that’s saturating the WAN link. That correlation is impossible with vendor tools that only see their own slice.

The goal is turning a 30-minute investigation into a 30-second conversation. I’ve got a polished demo with a command center aesthetic and I’m working on Teams integration so people can just message SEER directly instead of logging into another interface. Because nobody needs another interface.

GHOSTWIRE

Live at: ghostwire.ghostlaboratory.net

Real-time threat intelligence rendered as generative audiovisual art. Every node, every connection, every sound represents actual malicious activity happening on the internet right now. Ransomware campaigns. Data breaches. Botnet traffic. The whole ugly symphony of the modern internet, turned into something you can stare at while your coffee gets cold.

Bun backend on Fly.io pulling from threat feeds. Three.js and Tone.js frontend on Cloudflare Pages. Multiple visual themes and musical modes. It’s the kind of project that sounds pretentious until you actually watch it for a few minutes and realize the internet is genuinely terrifying and also kind of beautiful.

GHOST LAB STUDIO

Building FIVE NINES taught me I hate writing the same JSON configs over and over. Every sprite slice, every animation definition, every particle system — it’s all visual stuff that I’m defining in text files like some kind of caveman.

GHOST LAB STUDIO is a visual game dev tool for Phaser. Design sprites, animations, particles, and shaders by actually looking at them instead of guessing at numbers. Export configs. Hand to Claude Code for implementation. Keep the creative work creative.

Thirteen modules planned. Embedded terminal and Git panel. This one’s a longer-term project — lots of moving pieces — but I’m chipping away at it between everything else.

WAXSNAP

I collect vinyl. The experience of crate digging is great until you find something interesting, don’t recognize it, and have no idea if it’s worth $5 or $500. The Discogs app scans barcodes but half the records in the wild don’t have barcodes. And even when they do, you can’t hear the music before you buy.

WAXSNAP is the app I’ve always wanted at the record store. Point your phone at a cover, Claude’s vision API identifies it, and you get instant Discogs pricing, marketplace data, and wantlist status. But the real magic is the audio preview — hear the album right there in the store before you commit. No more gambling on cool cover art.

I’m also building in price sticker detection, so you can see if the shop is charging fair market value or trying to finesse you. And a record store finder for when you’re in a new city and need to scratch the itch.

The goal is an app that feels good to use while digging. Camera-first interface, gesture-driven, haptic feedback, little celebration moments when you find something on your wantlist. The kind of polish that makes you want to use it even when you don’t need to.

I bought waxsnap.com. So now I have to build it. That’s how commitment works.

LUMEN

A terminal companion for Claude Code. The idea: wrap your terminal and add live cost tracking, git status widgets, instant project snapshots, and a one-key interrupt for when Claude’s heading somewhere expensive and you need to stop it before your API bill gets interesting.

Longer-term project. The vision is solid. I’ll get there.

The Thread

None of these started with market research. They started with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” followed by mass scope creep and a lot of late nights.

FIVE NINES exists because I’ve spent enough years in IT to have opinions about corporate dystopia. SEER exists because I got tired of checking twelve systems to answer one question. GHOSTWIRE exists because threat dashboards are ugly. GHOST LAB STUDIO exists because I hate writing JSON. WAXSNAP exists because I stood in a record store frustrated that my phone couldn’t do the one thing I needed. LUMEN exists because Claude Code is great but I want more.

Vibe coding isn’t about shipping products. It’s about scratching itches, learning new frameworks because the project demands it, and writing lore docs for games that might never ship but are definitely making me happy right now.

Sometimes the best reason to build something is just because it doesn’t exist yet.