Porting Hobby Hero

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

The NHL season started on September 29. Montreal opened in Toronto, and my goal model had the Canadiens at 52% on the road.

The end result matched a pre-game Mastodon poll, with Montreal winning in regular time. The model’s favourite won too.

I wanted Hobby Hero on my phone for nights like that, so this week I ported it. It started as a Claude artifact, and it still is one. But the same page now also lives at play.latentmirror.com/hobby-hero, as an app you can install (phone or desktop). All of its data ships with it, so after the first visit it opens with no connection at all.

The port was fiddly. An artifact is one big file: the styles, the script and five seasons of data all sit inside the page. A site with a strict security policy allows none of that, so everything had to come apart. The data alone became six files (one per season, plus a core). The fonts I used to borrow from Google are served from my own site now. Both editions are built from the same source, and a test checks that they show the same numbers for the same game. The code is public too, which is new.

It is not finished. The data stops on June 14, with the last game of the Final. Every game of the new season shows a pre-season estimate: last year’s form and last year’s main starters, with no trades, signings or injuries. Those numbers stay frozen until I rebuild the page with played games. The next feature is to auto re-index as the season progresses.

Also, it still has not beaten the closing market, and the page says so.

Still, the whole schedule is in there. Montreal’s home opener is October 6 against Carolina, and the model has Carolina at 64%.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. So glad hockey is back!

Connections

Make your agent your Ron MacLean

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

AI-assisted draft

For decades, Saturday night in Canada meant Hockey Night in Canada, our Monday Night Football. It was free on CBC until the 2026–27 season, when it moved behind Sportsnet’s paywall (CBC News).

The best part was often the first intermission. Coach’s Corner put two mainstays side by side: Don Cherry, a career minor-league defenceman with a single NHL game for the Bruins, later their coach, then the loudest suit in hockey media. Ron MacLean was the steady one. The contrast was stark and the chemistry flawless. Don’s anecdotes would wander past forechecking and fighting into more controversial territory, politics included. Ron was the embodiment of restraint, moderation and conciliation: the sensible Canadian most of us up here would recognize in ourselves.

That’s the pairing I want with an AI agent. I’m Don. The agent should be Ron.

Ron might have nodded along on the night that ended Coach’s Corner, but that doesn’t change all the times he moderated Don when he went off. Ron reflected on his mistake, apologized and learned from it, and that’s what I want my agent to do when it falls into the trap of sycophancy.

Left alone, a conversation with a model drifts the way Don did, except the model nods along the whole way. Sycophancy on top of our own cognitive biases is how people slide into what’s been called chatbot psychosis. The fix is guardrails, set up before you need them:

cool-down periods before anything irreversible: sleep on it, then decide
plan before execute: the agent proposes, I confirm
firm rules kept separate from guidelines: code enforces the rules, the model weighs the guidelines
no sycophancy: ask for the counter-argument, every time

Ron never muzzled Don, and the guardrails aren’t there to muzzle me either. Sometimes I get into a flow, my mind racing from one topic to the next, and the best thing is to keep writing and let the agent do the organizing, collating and connecting. The one condition is that I re-read all of it once before it moves forward.

Trust, but verify. Let Don be Don, and keep Ron in the chair.

Latent Mirror — hockey

Porting Hobby Hero

Connections

Make your agent your Ron MacLean

Connections