2026 Week 12
Slower Days
Work moved a bit slower this week. I couldn't quite tell why. Coming off the previous week, I had a certain pace in mind, and this one just didn't match it. Still, it wasn't a bad week—just one that required a bit more patience than expected.
There were moments of friction, some incidents here and there, and a general sense of things not flowing as smoothly as they could. But in between all of that, something important did click.
Running Helfer on Helfer
I reached a milestone that felt significant for Helfer.
One of the goals I've had for a while is to be able to run Helfer inside itself—to import its own repository into Helfer and develop it from there. That idea of using the thing I'm building as part of the building process itself has been on my mind for a long time.
It's a kind of dogfooding, but more than that, it closes a gap I've felt before. With PHP Sandbox, there was always this slight disconnect—building something without really living inside it enough. And over time, that distance makes it harder to see what actually needs to change, especially in the early stages.
This time, I wanted it to be different.
Getting there wasn't straightforward. A lot had to change just to make this possible—the provisioning system, how tokens are resolved for cloning repositories, the cloning process itself, and how everything ties together inside Helfer so it feels smooth enough to use.
I had to run the import process over and over again. At first, I used a smaller repository just to move faster, but eventually I switched to Helfer itself. That's when it became real.
The cloning part was fast, but setup wasn't. Installing dependencies, building packages—it took time. And often, something would fail halfway through. I'd fix it, try again, wait again. Repeat.
There were also smaller but equally important pieces: secrets, environment variables, making sure everything the project depended on was already in place before the import even began. A lot of thinking went into making sure the process didn't just work, but worked reliably.
And now it does.
Being able to build the software from within itself changes the entire experience. I remember prompting the LLM to build a small feature, watching it happen, pushing to GitHub, seeing it deploy, refreshing—and the feature is just there. It's immediate in a way that feels almost surreal.
It already feels like it's going to unlock a lot.
Using It for Real
After getting it to work, the next step became obvious: just use it.
I've already started doing that in small ways. Sitting with my food, on my phone, prompting things, watching them get done. It's a simple moment, but it carries something I've wanted for a long time—being able to use something like PHP Sandbox in this way, casually, from anywhere.
It took a while to get here, but I'm glad it exists now.
There's a quiet excitement in seeing it come together like this. Not in a loud, dramatic way, but in a steady sense that things are starting to align.
Experiments and Directions
I've also been looking into a few things around this.
One that stood out is the agent browser CLI from Vercel. Right now, testing through Playwright MCP works, but it comes with a lot of friction. There are too many layers, and each layer increases the chance that something breaks.
The agent browser approach seems simpler, and potentially cheaper too, especially considering how costs can spike when agents are actively testing through MCP.
It's not plug-and-play though. There's still work needed to make it fit properly into Helfer, so I'll be experimenting with it to see where it leads.
At the same time, it's been interesting watching Vercel release more tools in this space. Some of them are things I've personally wished existed. Seeing them materialize like this makes everything feel a bit more possible.
Building in This Moment
LLM-assisted coding continues to change how all of this feels.
There are ideas I've had for a long time that never quite made it into reality—mostly because of time, or the effort required to even get started. That gap is getting smaller now.
It's not that the work disappears, but the barrier to trying things does. You can sit with an idea and move it forward almost immediately.
Being able to build in a time like this feels rare. There's a sense that a lot of things that once felt distant are now within reach, as long as I'm willing to keep showing up and doing the work.
And that part still matters.
Till next time, Bosun