The Workshop Behind the Product
Most people show you the finished thing. The polished app, the clean dashboard, the “I built this in a weekend” tweet. What they leave out is the three weeks of dead ends, the config file that broke production, and the 2am realisation that the entire approach was wrong.
Second Brain Chronicles is the other kind of documentation.
What You’ll Find Here
Every two weeks, I’ll publish what actually happened while building Cerebro — an AI-augmented second brain that manages my projects, writing, consulting work, and daily operations.
Each issue follows a consistent structure:
- The Headline — The biggest thing that happened this week
- What I Built — Working systems, agents, and automations that shipped
- What Broke — Failures, debugging sessions, and lessons from things going wrong
- By The Numbers — Real metrics from the system: token costs, agent counts, automation stats
- The Rabbit Hole — A deep dive into one specific problem or technique
- Code Snippet — A useful piece of code from the week’s work
Why Document This?
Building in public is easy when things work. The interesting part is documenting when they don’t — and being specific enough about the failures that someone else can learn from them without repeating them.
The system I’m building is genuinely useful to me. But the process of building it is where the transferable knowledge lives. That’s what SBC captures.
The Stack
For the curious, here’s what Cerebro currently runs on:
- Obsidian for the knowledge layer
- Claude Code with custom agents and skills
- MCP servers connecting AI to real services
- n8n for workflow automation
- Kit.com for newsletter distribution
More details in each issue as things evolve.
This is issue zero. The real build logs start next week.