Go on Greg Herlein

Announcing Gorai! A Modern Robotics Framework

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been teasing this for a while. Time to stop teasing. Meet Gorai — a modern, open-source robotics framework written in Go.

Developing a BrightSign Extension

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Most people think of a BrightSign player as the little box behind a screen that loops a video. That’s true right up until you realize the thing is a full ARM64 Linux computer with an NPU sitting idle most of the day. And you can run your own code on it. Natively. That’s what an extension is, and once you grok it, a whole world opens up.

Agentic Python Considered Harmful

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Python won because it was easy. That was the whole trick. And now, in the age of agentic coding, that trick has stopped being an advantage — and quietly became a liability.

The Chainsaw I Built Was for Learning. Superpowers Is for Scaling.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Last post I showed off the chainsaw I built myself — my build-autonomous loop, the padded room, the whole rig — and cut down a little tree with it: a Go CLI to boss around a smart plug. It was well worth building! I also think you should probably stop building your own. Yes, including me. Especially me.

A Chainsaw at an Axe-Chopping Contest: My Current Agentic Loop

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

People keep asking me how I actually work with Claude Code now. Not the “does AI coding work” question — I’ve beaten that horse into glue on this blog already — but the boring, practical, how-does-my-loop-actually-work question. So here it is. The whole rig. And fair warning: what I’m about to describe is a chainsaw, and most of the industry is still lined up at the axe-chopping contest.

The New Whale Chase: Drones, Hydrophones, and a Father-Son Project

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:00:01 -0800

After two years of false starts with the Bristlemouth platform and permit headaches, I’m revisiting my whale song project with a completely different approach: semi-autonomous floating drones. The regulatory landscape has forced a rethink, and honestly, it might lead to something better.

2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Looking back at 2025, one theme dominates: AI agentic programming went from novelty to necessity. This year transformed how I think about software development, career advice, and even my personal hardware projects. Here’s what I wrote about, what I learned, and what I expect in 2026.

Programming Languages in 2026

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:03:00 -0800

Popularity, Jobs, LLM Proficiency, Concurrency Complexity, and Deployment Complexity

Five factors now drive language choice: developer adoption, job market demand, LLM code generation quality, concurrency handling, and deployment complexity. Here’s how they intersect.

Why Go for Robotics?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Python dominates robotics today. C++ is the serious choice. But I’m starting to think we’ve been sleeping on Go. Here’s why I’m actively exploring it.

Using Claude Code to Build gocat

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:01 -0800

In my previous post about Claude Code, I talked about using VS Code devcontainers to safely run Claude in “dangerous mode.” That was great for a typical software project. But what about something harder? What about porting a complex hardware-interfacing library from Python to Go, where you need to deeply understand USB protocols, radio registers, and firmware internals?

That’s exactly what I did with gocat – a Go library for controlling the YardStick One sub-GHz RF transceiver. And Claude Code was instrumental in making it happen.

From Clicking Yes to Letting Claude Run Wild (Safely)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:01 -0800

So I’ve been working on this project called client-w-mcp – it’s a leanring project to truly understand how an AI agent works with MCP servers. And I’m exploring Agentic development - with Claude Code. Why Claude Code? The first time I used it, Claude just… flowed. It seems to do a lot more by itself to figure things out. I especially like the Task() so that it can go do more than one thing at a time.

Learning gRPC in golang - with some ChatGPT help

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I decided to learn how to write gRPC code in golang - and used ChatGPT as an accelerator! Jump to the writeup.