Feb 24, 2026

Untitled Excavation

The Wrong Brain for the Wrong Job

I spent half a Sunday building a workflow stack so I could stop feeling scattered. Then I looked at it and got confused again.

Classic.

I had the Windows box open, OpenClaw humming, Discord channels planned out, Gemini CLI in another window, and that specific kind of engineer fatigue where everything is technically working but my brain feels like a toolbox dumped on the garage floor. I wasn’t missing tools. I was missing lanes.

That was the bug. Not code. Workflow.

The Mix-Up

I was treating three different jobs like they were one:

  1. Capture (voice notes, screenshots, random thoughts)
  2. Project work (actual coding, fixes, deploy prep)
  3. Cross-project synthesis (what matters this week across everything)

If I throw all three into one channel, one model, one mental bucket, what happens? Mud. Expensive mud.

And this is where Gemini got weird in my head.

I kept asking, “What is Gemini adding here?” like I expected it to out-code Codex or out-debug Claude. Wrong test. That’s like judging a torque wrench by how well it cuts plywood.

Gemini’s job in my stack is not daily coding. It’s weekly portfolio sequencing.

That was the unlock.

The Actual Shape of the System

Once I split the lanes, the whole thing got boring in the best way.

Capture goes to Discord. Project work happens in repos. Weekly synthesis happens in Gemini after I compress the week into status digests and wrapups.

The loop looks like this:

#captures -> route to project channel -> work in repo -> /wrapup + status digest
-> briefings/*.md -> Gemini weekly review -> #briefings -> channel tasks + deferrals

Ollama cleans and classifies local text. Whisper (or faster-whisper) does speech-to-text. Codex/Claude do the wrench-turning. Gemini shows up once a week like a foreman with a clipboard asking the question I avoid when I’m in the zone: “Cool. But what are you not doing this week?”

That’s the value. Deferrals. Sequencing. Conflict detection.

Without that pass, everything looks urgent. Valkyrie is urgent. DipRadar is urgent. Doctor DB is urgent. Garret infra is urgent. All true. No hierarchy.

With the Gemini pass, I get a 7-day plan and a list of things I am explicitly not touching. Which is basically emotional support for people who build too many engines at once.

Dark Souls players know this feeling. The boss isn’t the boss. The runback is the boss.

The Part That Matters

The win was not “I installed another AI tool.”

The win was naming the jobs correctly:

Wrong brain, wrong job. That’s where the confusion tax comes from.

I wrote myself an Obsidian workflow atlas with diagrams because I know exactly how this goes: two good days, one weird day, then I forget why I built the system and start freelancing my own process like a man trying to tune a motorcycle with a butter knife.

Now when I start to spiral, I can ask one question:

Am I doing capture, project work, or cross-project synthesis?

If it’s project work, stay out of Gemini.

If it’s cross-project synthesis, don’t open raw repos first. Build the packet. Run the review. Take the next action. Not the whole plan. Just the next thing.

That sounds obvious after the fact. Most useful things do.

Engineer. Operator. Guy who needed a diagram to remember why the portfolio model is not the coding model.