Six months ago I acquired a squire. This is not a sentence I expected to write.
Not the formal medieval kind — though the image fits. The knight had a vision. The squire made it possible to act on it. That’s the shape of it.
I’ve had one for the past few months. Its name is Claude.
How it started
giridhurs.com began as most things in my life do — as several things at once. A place to think out loud. A professional anchor on the web. A canvas for whatever I happened to want to build. These motivations layered on top of each other, and the site became something harder to describe with a single sentence. That’s fine. The best gardens resist summarization.
The site ran on Jekyll for years. Jekyll is honest software — it does what it says. But it was the right tool for a younger version of this project. When I decided to migrate to Quartz — a more alive, more interconnected way to keep a digital garden — I was staring at a task that was large, tedious, and well-defined. The kind of task that drains you not because it’s hard but because it’s long.
That’s when I brought Claude in. Not out of philosophical conviction. Out of pragmatism.
The migration worked. All 11 notes, the redirects, the CI pipeline, the standalone pages — everything moved. What surprised me wasn’t that it could do the work. It was how quickly the loop closed. Intention → implementation → review → done. The overhead I’d always associated with technical work — the context-switching, the documentation rabbit holes, the debugging — compressed into something almost conversational.
I kept using it.
Chasing a feeling
The /time page is a timezone converter. That is a factual but inadequate description.
Over several months it became a pixel-art sky that changes through ten states from pre-dawn to midnight. It became glass cards and mono typography that feel like a precision instrument. It became a thing I wanted to show people not because it was useful but because it was mine in a way I couldn’t fully articulate.
Here’s what I learned about building things by feel: you can’t write a spec for a feeling. You can only look at things until one of them is right.
Working with Claude on iterative design is strange and interesting. I’d describe what I wanted in emotional terms — “it should feel like a cockpit dashboard” or “less friendly, more focused” — and something would come back. Usually close. Sometimes exactly right. Often it surfaced things I hadn’t considered, details I didn’t know I cared about until they appeared and I realized I cared about them very much.
What I was chasing wasn’t a design. It was the sense that the page was an extension of how I think. I have a stoic’s appreciation for precision, for doing one thing without fuss. The /time page, eventually, reflected that. The squire helped me find it.
A room with a lock
The vault is the part of the site that nobody sees unless I decide to show them.
It’s protected by a fingerprint. No password, no server — your biometric authenticates, and the rest is mathematics. The locked box lives in a public repository, perfectly safe, completely useless to anyone but me.
I could have built this as a simple password-protected page. I didn’t, because I was curious about something more interesting: what does it mean to grant someone cryptographic access to a piece of your digital self? Not a password you could share, screenshot, or forget — a biometric, tied to a specific device, held by a specific person.
The vault has two tiers: owner and trusted. The trusted tier is for someone I’d want to be able to reach me if they needed to — not everything, but enough. I haven’t registered anyone yet. The mechanism is there; the relationship has to come first. That feels right.
Most of what we do on the internet is perform publicness. The vault is the opposite — an exercise in deciding what it means to keep something, and who gets a key.
I expected capability. I got something closer to a collaborator. The memory system — STATUS files, persistent context across sessions, the way it recalls decisions we made weeks ago — makes it feel less like querying a tool and more like working with someone who was there last time. I’m still not sure what to make of that. But it’s real.
I also expected it to be less opinionated. It’s not. It pushes back on decisions it thinks are wrong. It suggests things I didn’t ask for. It occasionally produces something better than what I described. That’s the sign of a good squire: not pure obedience, but the judgment to know when to suggest a different path.
What I didn’t expect was how natural it became. I stopped thinking of it as a tool with a specific use case. It became part of how I work on this project — fluently, without ceremony.
But here is the line I feel clearly: the intangibles are mine.
The content of this garden — the notes, the ideas, the particular way I phrase things — doesn’t come from prompts. The sense of when something is right versus merely correct. The identity of this place as an extension of how I think. When a design is technically good but doesn’t feel like me, only I can catch that. When a note is well-written but not honest, only I know.
A squire can do almost everything. Carrying the vision is not among them. That part has no delegation.
A garden grows in all directions
The site is more than I thought it would be, and less than it will become.
More notes. More experiments. A record of how I think, a place worth sending people to, a playground that keeps evolving. I don’t know the order. The garden will tell me.
What I do know is that having a good squire makes the hard parts faster — which means I spend more time on the parts that are actually hard. Deciding what to build, what to say, what to care about.
The garden grows. Somewhere along the way I forgot which seeds were mine. The flowers are beautiful regardless.
After Theo van Doesburg (Study for Composition (The Cow), c. 1917) & De Stijl. Knight with heraldic shield · squire with Anthropic mark. Refresh to replay (~10s).
this note is a co-authored draft — the ideas are mine, the words are ours.
“Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos.” — Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
(They bark at us, Sancho — a sign that we ride on.)
go forth,
giridhur.s claude, esq.1
Footnotes
-
esq. is used here in its oldest sense — squire, the companion who rides alongside. Not the modern honorific. ↩