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mager.co

Tech, food & life from Chicago.

mager.co: The Chicago edition

01 / Technology & making things

All tech

Jev: a decision model

Testing TypeSafe's Jev through Vercel AI Gateway, putting it inside a decision-heavy skill, and building a matchup reader for my reputation-based sports picks app.

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02

Instinct: a capable agent in your DMs

What changed when I could text an agent from iMessage: everyday cleanup, questions worth following up on, and the trust that makes casual delegation possible.

03

Eve: define your agent, deploy it, use it from anywhere

Define your agent in a directory, deploy it to Vercel's cloud with one command, and access it from anywhere. Months in, Eve has grown a platform around that model — capability registry, sandbox, subagents, agent-to-agent calls, MCP, evals — and my agent is still live, driven remotely from the eve TUI.

04

AI Gateway: the end of the single-provider AI subscription

I'm moving off single-provider AI subscriptions toward a stack of parts — Eve for agents, Vercel AI Gateway as the primary model access and billing layer with no-markup provider pricing, and OpenCode Go kept as the fallback — and the enterprise version of that stack is the real product.

05

tmux: orchestrating agents with send-keys and capture-pane

tmux is a 2007 terminal multiplexer that turns out to be the most native orchestration layer AI agents have: one session per agent, driven by any principal — human or model — with send-keys and capture-pane. No SDK, no plugin, no vendor lock-in; Claude, Codex, and OpenCode all speak it out of the box.

06

OpenSpec: The agreement layer that keeps your agent honest

AI coding assistants confidently build the wrong thing when requirements live only in chat. OpenSpec adds a lightweight spec layer — explore, propose, build, archive — so you agree on what to build before any code is written, and the specs persist in your repo as history your agent can read back. Here's the mental model, a real change from a skills discovery portal, and where it earns its keep.

07

OpenCode Go + Buzz: killing Claude Code for a $10 harness

Second harness migration in two months. The always-on agent on my Mac mini now runs OpenCode on $10/mo open models instead of Claude Code, reachable from my phone over my own Buzz relay instead of Telegram. The interesting part: the swap was one line, because the protocol — not the model — is the actual seam.

02 / Food & the kitchen

All recipes

Something good
is cooking.

Recipes I come back to.
Ingredients I get curious about.

Euglena Yogo Parfait

I picked up euglena powder on Ishigaki — a single-celled organism that's part plant, part animal, packed with vitamins, minerals, and omega-3s — and the package had a yogurt recipe on it. Here's my yogo parfait take, plus why euglena is amazing.

Cherry Tomato Pasta

Blistered cherry tomatoes and garlic collapse into a full pasta sauce in twenty minutes — no peeling, no seeding, finished with butter and pasta water.

Japanese Butter Soy Spaghetti

A five-ingredient Japanese-style spaghetti — butter, tamari, and parmesan tossed with hot pasta and finished with green onion. The wafu pasta I kept eyeing in Tokyo, made at home in ten minutes.

IRL(in real life)

Mager and Boris Cherny smiling together for a selfie at Uber HQ in San Francisco
[01]
Meeting BorisUber HQ, San Francisco, CA
Noah Kahan performing at Wrigley Field, his face filling the giant screen above the stage as the full band plays below
[02]
Noah Kahan at Wrigley FieldWrigley Field, Chicago, IL
Screenshot of the mager-bench dashboard showing model scores
[03]
A table card on a bar reading 'Andersonville Pride' in rainbow letters, surrounded by a word cloud — acceptance, love, community, dignity, equality, celebrate
[04]
Pride PostcardLady Gregory's, Andersonville, Chicago, IL

04 / Life

All life ↗

AFK(away from ⌨️)

Sumo: My First Grand Tournament in Tokyo

We missed the original ticket sale, got rescued by a tour, and spent an afternoon learning how much more fun sumo is when someone helps you understand what you're watching.

One more before you go

The back page.