Software, writing, and a geodesic dome in the Arkansas woods.
The house I built in 2010: a three-frequency geodesic dome, 19 feet across, made of galvanized conduit with the ends crimped and bolted. Each strut is colored by its length. Drag to turn it.
I’m a programmer in Russellville, Arkansas. Most of what I build simulates something: light, evolution, weather, music, a greenhouse farm. Since 2010 I’ve also written about the rest of my life, from living off grid in a dome I built to walking the Appalachian Trail and my teenage years in Kenya.
Teens
My parents were missionaries in Kenya. In high school I lived with the Pokot for a time.
A story from then2004
I thru-hiked it, after five years of training with a 100 lb pack up and down a hill.
Hiking notes2010
Nineteen feet of galvanized conduit, shrink wrap and papercrete, for about $3,000. It’s the one at the top of this page.
How it went2010–2026
1,453 pieces: a blog called Minimal Intentions, Quora answers and Facebook posts.
The archive2016–2026
AjaxCMS, then a ray tracer, an evolution simulator, generated music and more.
The software2022
I got a “real job” at Apptegy.
2023
I got married, and we got a dog.
How it started2026
We got a camper van, as a mobile kennel.
The vanPhotographs from the archive, most of them from around home. Each one links to its post.
Open source, most of it simulations, most of it in Rust. I choose what to make and steer; Claude writes most of the code. Everything links to its code, and the ones that run in a browser link there too.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
A mesh-free ray tracer. Scenes are signed distance fields, NURBS surfaces and fractals, rendered on the CPU with AVX2 or on the GPU with WGSL, with an editor, rigid-body physics, a game mode and an MCP server for building scenes from an AI.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
Creatures with multi-jointed bodies and neural-network brains evolve on an island with weather, sound and a zoo, and keep learning during their lives. The brains run on the GPU.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
Do stock correlations predict the market? Sixty-six pre-registered tests, all the data, and a triple pendulum that shows why not. Send an idea as a pull request and I will test it.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
fleece animates Electric Sheep fractal flames live, on the GPU and CPU, and sets them to music it composes in twelve genres. It made twenty-two one-minute videos, one for each genre and mix. Open source under the GPL.
Flame: electricsheep.248.37112, designed by freakiebeat, CC BY 3.0 US. Artwork by Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Fable 5.1, instigated by Brandon Hoult
Six small first-person shooters, each made under a tight limit: three in x86-64 assembly that fit in 64 or 256 KB, one in 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64, a Rust port with no libraries that plays in the browser, and a WebGL game in one HTML file.
Made by Claude Opus 5, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
An epistemic ledger: a signed, append-only record of claims, the evidence for them and where it came from, kept by people and AI agents together.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
Endless generated music in twelve genres and their mixes, on the command line, with an equalizer and a window for choosing genres.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
A terminal file viewer and editor: the tree on the left, the file on the right, the mouse everywhere. Markdown, code, CSV, images, archives and git history.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
A greenhouse farm that feeds one person, simulated in one HTML file: two robot arms on a rail, real weather, everything metered.
Made by Brandon Hoult
A CMS that runs entirely in the browser. The server only hands out static files and directory listings, and pages change without reloading.
Made by Claude Opus 5.5, instigated by Brandon Hoult
A GTK app and command line for the case lighting of an Alienware Aurora ACT1250 on Linux, where Alienware offers none.
Things built to see what happens, on experiments.galedra.org.
Made by the pi coding agent on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, instigated by Brandon Hoult
Can a coding agent on a local model improve a program by itself? The pi coding agent built Browser OS, a desktop in a browser tab, then polished it in unattended passes on one gaming PC: three versions, from a first 45-minute pass to 41 passes over 75 hours.
Since 2010 I’ve written about living off grid on my blog, Minimal Intentions, answered questions on Quora and posted on Facebook. All 1,453 pieces are in one archive you can search, sort and comment on.
| Year | Minimal Intentions | Quora answers | Facebook posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| 2011 | 14 | 0 | 1 |
| 2012 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| 2013 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2 | 10 | 1 |
| 2015 | 0 | 50 | 14 |
| 2016 | 0 | 123 | 5 |
| 2017 | 0 | 35 | 2 |
| 2018 | 0 | 28 | 87 |
| 2019 | 0 | 7 | 290 |
| 2020 | 0 | 10 | 183 |
| 2021 | 0 | 2 | 206 |
| 2022 | 0 | 6 | 92 |
| 2023 | 0 | 0 | 35 |
| 2024 | 0 | 0 | 78 |
| 2025 | 0 | 6 | 94 |
| 2026 | 0 | 1 | 42 |
Pieces written each year. The busiest was 2019, with 297.