Avoid failure mode in the Chaos Dimension

I had a baby. The failure mode on parental leave is doing nothing useful, or doing one thing badly and burning out on it. I wanted neither.

So I built tools. Three of them.

Chaos Dimension is a personal Kanban board with a column for “an agent is working on this.” It has its own MCP server, so Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and claude.ai can read, claim, and update tasks from inside any session. Lives at chaosdimension.fyi.

claude-rc-server is the per-repo runtime on a VPS. One systemd user service per repo, persistent across reboots, with Chaos Dimension’s MCP registered at user scope. Always-on Claude Code sessions claim cards from the board and work on them while my laptop is closed.

Chaos Conductor is the control plane. It reconciles desired state on the board against actual state on the box: which claude-rc@* units are up, how many sessions each is holding, how much RAM is free. Imperative MCP wrappers and status read-back are live. The declarative reconcile loop is the next milestone.

Together they let me ship without a team. I dictate a card at 2am with a sleeping kid on my chest. An agent on the droplet claims it. By morning the work is in review.

What came out of leave so far:

• A generative-retrieval paper for cover-song identification
• A multi-language GEC system for three low-resource Slavic languages
• The three tools above
• A few side projects I won’t list

None of this works without the substrate. Models are good at the doing now. The bottleneck is shared state that doesn’t lie to itself.