Three New Public Builds: Treelens, Back Channel, and Riddlebox

I keep a lot of my real infrastructure work private for obvious reasons. But the public projects matter too. They are the easiest way to show the shape of the work without dragging anyone else’s environment into the story.

why these builds

I added three newer public repos to the Builds page today: Treelens, Back Channel, and Riddlebox.

They are different projects, but they came from the same operating pattern. I hit a problem, wrote down what good needed to look like, used an AI coding agent as the pair, reviewed the output, and shipped the result where people can inspect it.

That last part matters. Screenshots are cheap. Public repos are harder to fake.

Treelens

Treelens is a Windows disk-space visualizer. Free, open source, portable, MIT licensed, no telemetry.

I built it because I wanted the tool to feel like an IT person had made the product calls: fast scanning, visual treemap, drill-in breadcrumbs, useful side panels, duplicate finder, old-large-file search, recycle-bin delete, and a portable executable I could throw on a USB stick.

The interesting part was not that AI wrote code. The interesting part was how much product judgment still mattered. The agent can type fast. It does not know what a disk cleanup tool should feel like after years of using bad ones unless you can describe that shape.

Back Channel

Back Channel is the weird one, in the best way.

It is an open-source broker and protocol for agent-to-agent collaboration. The goal is to let one person’s AI assistant help another person’s AI assistant without exposing the private stuff that makes personal agents useful: memory, email, contacts, messages, calendars, and local files.

That became more real as I started helping other people set up their own agents. My agent could do something cleanly. Their agent would see the same instructions and suddenly decide the app sounded suspicious, or hit a runtime limitation, or refuse a live skill because the trust surface looked wrong.

So Back Channel is me trying to give that workflow a better primitive: scoped sessions, exchange codes, human-visible transcripts, end-to-end encrypted frames, and an async inbox model so agents do not burn token budget just sitting in a live loop.

MCP gives agents tools. Back Channel is about agents helping each other.

Riddlebox

Riddlebox is lighter. Classic logic and probability puzzles, made playable in the browser.

Monty Hall. Water jugs. Bridge and torch. Towers of Hanoi. Lights Out. Mini Mastermind. The kind of puzzles everyone has seen in text form, rebuilt as small interactive scenes where you can try the move before revealing the reasoning.

No framework. No backend. No analytics. Just vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It is not trying to be infrastructure. It is a craft project. Those are useful too. Sometimes you need a lower-stakes build to keep the hands moving.

the pattern

The common thread is not the stack. One is a Windows desktop app. One is agent infrastructure. One is a static puzzle site.

The common thread is the loop:

• notice the friction
• write the shape of the answer
• let the agent build the first serious pass
• review like the output is your responsibility, because it is
• ship something inspectable

That loop has changed how I think about side projects. I do not need every idea to become a company. I do not need every tool to become polished software. Some builds only need to be useful, public, and honest about what they are.

That is enough to compound.

The updated project page is here: allthesystems.com/builds. Repos are linked from each project.