I just had a short session with Claude that gave me an idea. I finished by saying thanks and that "another you is aleady implementing it". Claude replied with a single thumbs-up emoji, and all I could think of was:

Our small farm has some forest attached, and we have a tractor from the 80s with an old winch/crane to get logs out. Earlier this year, I cleaned out an old barn and put in a Woodmizer sawmill. Autumn and winter are the right time for forest work, so I took most of yesterday to do just that.

I had felled a tree that was killed by bark beetles last summer, meaning that it has had time to dry while standing already and the lunber can be used right away. I managed to pull out a double length (~9.5m) log to the saw, just 200m away, and cut it in two there.

Then I rolled in onto the saw which turned it into 2-by-8s (50x200mm). Below are a few pictures of the process, click to enlarge. And if you happen to be local to the Östhammar region, we're open for business: info (in Swedish) at https://www.bestbo.se/sag/.

Yes, one can safely pet her even when she looks like she's gonna kill you.

Here's another example for the kind of task that I no longer do myself but rather hand off to the AI, because it does it so well. I asked like this:

Let's implement a new option --fib_eff that gets a single value or a range, like 0.9 or 0.7-0.9 , in order to set the fiber efficiencies in the simulation. see fiber_efficiency.md how to do that. set the eff after loading the HDF file, dont modify it. Ranges like 0.7-0.9 are to be interpreted as a random value within that range, uniformly distributed. ask if this was unclear, othweise get crackin and iterate. example command: uv run andes-sim flat-field --band H --subslit slitA --wl-min 1600 --wl-max 1602 --fib_eff 0.5-0.95

As expected, Claude had no problem figuring this out. This the resulting commit. The image above is the ouput of that example command.

I did not have to to type anything else than the prompt above. And in doing that, I needed to get clear for myself what I actually wanted, which is always a good thing to do first. The rest is just typing.

The whole project, a CLI to make simulated spectra, was "vibe-coded" this way, me caring little about the actual code that Claude produced, only taking the occasional glance at it. It is therefore probably not great for a long-term maintained code-base, but it already does what I need it to and I have no intention to take this much further.

Running a small farm implies a constant stream of things to fix. The image shows an example of when the fruit grinder (to the right) in our juicery broke down. The motor fried itself towards the end of the season and I was hesitant to make the investment of a new one for just two remaining days.

Thus, one of the old motors that one naturally accumulates had to drive it externally with a belt. At first I did not gut the old motor which made it melt a second time thanks to induction -- lesson learned. The receiving axle is not perpendicular to the floor, so I made the angle of the other one adjustable together with the belt tension, by using one of the most important tools of all, a ratchet strap.

Old meets new, the tractor and wire crane from the 80s put a log onto the brand-new sawmill.

Oh my! This site has been somewhat neglected, hasn't it? More than a year since the last post. The house and woodshed in that picture not even ours any more! We bought a farm outside of Östhammar this spring, and spent an awful lot of time moving and getting settled.

Taking over such a large place is no easy task, but I now get to do fun things like driving my tractor into my forest to get timber and firewood.

The farm has its website at https://www.bestbo.se and there you find the social media links, and some occasional updates.

The aforementioned freshly-built woodshed. Apart from the three old pallets that serve as floor, this is made completely from lumber that I made myself, from trees that needed to be taken down because of bark bettles.

Not sure yet, if it will get plainted in the same Falu red as the house, or allowed to grey on its own.