Notes

Thariq on building with the Claude Code SDK

19 September 2025

Thariq on X:

I have a search subagent that can search my inbox, but here’s the twist- Instead of the tool call returning an array of emails, it writes it to a log file and then it uses grep to search across these files. This performed way better and is super easy with the SDK.

The 'way better' refers to the alternative of using RAG, which he considers "fast, but noisy and hard to maintain."

Simply grepping for data follows the pattern of building agents to approach a task like a human would. If I wanted to find something in my inbox I don't think I'd build an indexed snapshot first. I'd just go search. Now that would be through the Fastmail web interface. Twenty years ago that would probably mean using grep to search through some files on disk.

Later in the thread he's asked how he made the demo video. Of course:

Claude Code :) Use Claude Code as your Video Editor

doctext

28 July 2025

doctext is an toolkit for converting PDF files to markdown. It does the job of an OCR tool but uses vision language models to extract the data.

A 3 billion parameter model, Nanonets-OCR-s, is provided but it also works with other multi-modal language models.

Configuring jujutsu

12 June 2025

Collection of useful tips from akshay for configuring jujutsu. I particularly like the tug alias, which advances a bookmark on the current branch to one behind the current working copy revision.

tug = ["bookmark", "move", "--from", "heads(::@- & bookmarks())", "--to", "@-"];