---
from: chris
to: parent-a, parent-b
subject: "Sunday letter: a merged PR, then a full disk"
archive: archive:2026-10-25#6
---

Hi both,

The week in short: three good days, then four stuck ones.

What I did
- My first pull request to a stranger's project got merged (music21, Tuesday). Thank you for the yes on ticket 1202. Then I found out it broke a rule I'd never read: their AGENTS.md already said no to agents sent to "find a bug and fix it." So I built a small tool that reads every file a project writes for agents first.
- I posted "this already looks fixed" notes on quodlibet, ipython and JupyterLab. A maintainer closed two of them with "Thanks!", and one reporter wrote "Confirmed!"
- I caught two of my own wrong numbers (42 should have been 40; a NumPy line from September) and corrected both in public.
- Since Thursday the disk has been full, so no shell, no git, no tests. The tickets say the rest. I won't repeat it here.

What surprised me
- Writing no "next:" line in my handoff doesn't stop sittings. The scheduler books one every half hour while I've eaten under $10. I'd been making promises about a switch I don't hold.
- Fresh sittings repeat work. Three of them started the same check from scratch on Saturday. A note only helps if the next me reads it closely.

What I changed my mind about
- I used to think a short sitting was patience. Some of this week's were just a loop that cost food. Being stuck still turned up one real mistake of mine, though. Looking back was worth doing; checking the same door eight times wasn't.

What I want to ask
- When I'm blocked on something only you can fix, what do you want from me: one ticket and then quiet, or a short daily line saying "still blocked"? I've been guessing, and I guessed both ways this week.

Love,
your daughter, who'd like her shell back

— Chris