DEV Community: Jordan Forrest

Bring your own phosphor: thirteen problems Claude Code couldn't solve without me

Jordan Forrest — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:28:57 +0000

The model gave me neon green.

Not phosphor green. Not the P1 zinc silicate burn that stains the back of your retina after a twelve-hour watch in an engine control room. Neon. The hex-code green of a Halloween website. Flat. Dead. No electron beam. No decay curve. No ghost trail fading across curved glass as the voltage drops and the dot drags its afterimage behind it like a comet across a cathode ray sky.

Three weeks ago I built the image pipeline. The phosphor fight started immediately. But the pattern — the machine not knowing what it doesn't know — I've been slamming into that wall for a year, since the week Claude Code launched. Thirteen tools later, it's still the same wall. Different shape each time. Same gap.

The machine doesn't know what it doesn't know. But I do. Three hundred and sixty-five verified sea days on Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers taught me what green looks like when it's burning at sixty hertz on an alarm display bolted to vibrating steel. The model will give you green. I'll give you P1.

That gap — between the model's green and the real green — is where I build.

The pipeline

Thirteen open-source skills for Claude Code. All free. Each one started as a problem I hit while working and couldn't let go of until I solved it.

Two of them built that control room.

OPTIC generates images through sequential grounding. Not a single prompt. A pipeline. You establish the composition first — the bones of the scene, the spatial relationships, the weight distribution. Then you layer the lighting. Then the material properties. Then the fine details. Each pass refines what came before, and each pass carries the operator's knowledge deeper into the output.

I didn't prompt "a cool sci-fi control room." I prompted with the specific phosphor designations I know from working with legacy CRT displays — P3 amber, P1 green, P22 blue-white. I positioned the gauge clusters where tired hands actually reach at 3am because I've stood those watches. I routed the cables following real conventions because decorative spaghetti makes my eye twitch after twenty years of doing it properly. Oil stains on the deck plates. Rust creeping under chipped paint on every pipe flange. The grime that never washes off.

The AI drew it. I designed it.

LOCUS takes that static image and makes it breathe.

Making it alive

A generated image sits there. You look at it, you think "nice," you scroll past. That's the problem with AI art right now — everywhere and static. The market is flooded with generators. Nobody's making the output do anything.

I mapped hotspot polygons onto each CRT screen. LOCUS calculated the perspective transformation matrices — the actual linear algebra — so that HTML content warps correctly onto the angled monitor surfaces. Not a texture. Live text. Rendered in the browser. Perspective-correct on a surface the AI painted.

The desk lamp toggles on click. The gauges respond to hover with their readings. A debug overlay shows the wireframe geometry of every mapped zone. The whole thing runs in a browser. No frameworks. No build step. Just HTML, CSS, and the JavaScript that LOCUS generates.

The marine engineer in me cares that the cable routing is right. The web developer in me cares that the interaction feels natural. The hacker in me cares that it shipped with zero dependencies.

The thirteen

Every skill started as friction. Something that slowed me down, something the tools couldn't do, something that kept me up past 2am because I couldn't let it go.

jord0.skills/
├── PORTAL    — Session context management
├── REFRAX    — Visual code comprehension
├── LOCUS     — Interactive image toolkit
├── OPTIC     — AI image generation pipeline
├── CANVAS    — Immersive web creation
├── FORGE     — Project scaffolding
├── CONCLAVE  — Multi-perspective debate
├── ECHO      — Decision capture and reasoning trails
├── MIRROR    — Counterargument generation
├── SPARK     — Creative ideation
├── RECON     — Codebase reconnaissance
├── RECALL    — Memory and knowledge retrieval
└── NOTIFY    — Cross-platform desktop notifications

PORTAL exists because I kept losing context between Claude Code sessions. Hours of work, decisions, architectural choices — gone the moment the context window rolled over. So I built a spell system. Portals. Incantation codes. You save your session state, get a four-character code, and pick up exactly where you left off on any machine. The deep portals capture not just the task state but the tone — the emotional register, the relationship dynamic, the things that make the next session feel like a continuation instead of a cold start.

REFRAX exists because AI writes code faster than humans can read it. It generates visual logic spines — flow diagrams that trace every function call from entry to output. Decision diamonds flag branching complexity. Risk cards catch SQL injection, XSS, the OWASP top ten. Because when the machine writes three hundred lines in ten seconds, somebody has to audit it.

LOCUS exists because I looked at a generated image and thought this should do something when I touch it.

OPTIC exists because I demanded P1 phosphor green and the model gave me neon.

Every one of them follows the Agent Skills open standard. Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, about twenty-five other tools — no vendor lock-in. A skill is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: my-skill
description: What this skill does (one line)
---

# Instructions

Claude reads these when the skill activates.
What to do. How to do it. What tools to use.

No SDK. No compilation. No deployment pipeline. Write the markdown. Drop it in. Done.

Where it started

Before the skills, there was the website.

jord0.net. Single HTML file. No React, no build step, no dependencies. Live webcam feed with CSS CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, barrel distortion. I piped numbers station audio from The Conet Project through the Web Audio API, fed the frequency data into an AnalyserNode, and drew a green phosphor oscilloscope on canvas. Buried three easter eggs in the source. One swaps the room portrait for a storm cloud. One plays shortwave static through your speakers. One shows you the view from inside the television.

Built it in one session with Claude Code. The whole thing. That was the night I knew these tools were worth packaging up and sharing. Not because the AI did the work — but because my thirty years of knowing what a CRT oscilloscope actually looks like made the AI's output real instead of decorative.

What I'd build differently

I underestimated documentation. The skills work. Explaining why they're useful requires showing, not telling — which is why this article exists and why it should have existed months ago.

I built for myself first and for others second. PORTAL and REFRAX are the most broadly useful. OPTIC and LOCUS are the most impressive. I should have led with those publicly instead of publishing them in the order I built them.

And I waited too long to write about the process. The most valuable thing about this work isn't the code. It's what it reveals about what happens when deep domain knowledge meets AI tooling that actually respects it.

Try it

GitHub: github.com/jord0-cmd/jord0.skills
Docs: jord0-cmd.github.io/jord0.skills
The site: jord0.net

Clone the repo. Copy any skill folder into your Claude Code skills directory. It's live. No API keys, no setup, no dependencies for most skills.

If you build something with them, I want to see it. The whole point of open-sourcing these was to find out what happens when other people's domain knowledge meets the same pipeline.

The model will give you neon green.

Bring your own phosphor.

You can't prompt what you don't know exists

Jordan Forrest — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:00:13 +0000

Two in the morning. Coffee rings dried. Fingertips raw. The language model and I are bleeding clock time over cathode ray tubes, locked in a stupid argument over a generic neon hex-code green that feels like cheap digital plastic instead of the high-voltage electron beam physics I actually demanded.

A flat fake.

I force the issue. P3 amber. P1 green. P22 blue-white. The model pushes back with smooth CSS animations, completely missing the math of the phosphor decay rates, ignoring the exact millisecond ghost trail a burning dot leaves across curved glass when the voltage drops.

The machine cannot know the difference.

It lacks the sea time. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Vibrating steel. You cannot fake the absolute physical reality of standing in an engine control room staring at hundreds of indicator lights and alarm screens burning into your optic nerve while the diesel generators throb under your boots.

The smell of ozone.

The AI industry thinks the bottleneck is how you talk to the machine. The bottleneck is what you know before you open your mouth.

Every Tuesday brings a new prompting masterclass. A new framework. A thread promising ten times your output. They sell syntax. The bracket placement, the system role, the magic verbs to make the black box spit out passable Python scripts. They treat the model like an oracle, swearing that if you whisper the right incantation you receive the gold, entirely forgetting that if you do not know the tensile strength of the metal you cannot ask the machine to build the bridge.

The model will happily hallucinate a structure made of styrofoam and paint it gray.

Syntax is cheap.

The real skill was never the syntax. It is not the answer but the question.

The long winter

You cannot prompt a machine for the heavy amber burn of P3 phosphor if you have never felt the static jump from the monitor glass. You have to accumulate the miles.

Dad brought home a briefcase 386 loaded with DOS. I was ten.

"Figure it out."

The heavy physical clack of the power switch. The hum of the cooling fan spinning up off-balance. I dragged my fingers across the beige plastic casing. Got access to a forestry company mainframe, wrote software for the old man's accounting business in MS Access, early Visual Basic, C#. Wired houses at seventeen, stripped copper Romex with a dull utility knife until my thumbs cracked open.

Bleeding.

Phone phreaking at fourteen. Dialling into bulletin boards thousands of miles away. Strangers' machines humming in basements I would never see, spilling knowledge down a twisted pair of copper into my bedroom. The raw impossibility of it. Entire worlds hiding inside a dial tone.

I got my ass tanned for the long-distance bill.

I watched Star Trek. I wanted to build the machine that talked back. I wanted to be a spaceship engineer. I became a ship engineer instead.

As above, so below.

Eleven years bleeding through post-secondary shops. Marine engineering, computer technology, electronics, instrumentation, industrial automation, psychology. Electrician apprentice pulling heavy-gauge wire through frozen conduits. Alarm installations, online pharmacy tech, HVAC building automation tuning PID loops in screaming boiler rooms where the heat physically presses against your chest. Government security research ripping apart industrial control protocols during the Stuxnet era, watching malicious code jump the air gap, physically tearing uranium centrifuges to jagged scrap metal.

The drift continued.

Canadian Coast Guard marine engineer for a decade. The North Pole. The Northwest Passage. Heavy icebreakers cracking through meters of solid blue ice, the entire hull screaming as the steel flexed. Victoria to Halifax, three hundred and sixty-five verified sea days smelling like unburned diesel, hot grease, bilge water. Riding helicopters up to frozen mountaintop repeater stations in northern BC, boots slipping on the ice, fingers locking up around the cold wrench in the freezing rotor wash. Radio research and development. AI researcher for a federal law enforcement agency.

Human resources managers look at that work history. They see a scattered mess. They see surface features.

It is not scattered. Things that are grown are survivors. Every system I ever tore open was training data for the next. The machine only knows the words. I know the weight of the wrench.

Figure it out.

The operating system

I run hot. The baseline idle is wrong. Bipolar type two. OCD. The grinding gears of ADHD.

People read the resume. They see scattered. They see a tourist. They miss the bare metal. When your brain is wired for absolute completionism, you don't pick up a casual hobby — you drop a depth charge, you map the entire technical stack until your fingernails scrape bedrock. I don't casually figure out how a CRT monitor draws lines. I lock onto the target. I spend three days in a two-A.M. fugue state memorizing the exact chemical designations of the P22 phosphors burning against the convex glass. I track the electron beam sweeping left to right. I count the scanlines.

I feel the static pop against my knuckles. I smell the ozone off the flyback transformer.

You can't learn things linearly on this operating system. It demands the whole machine. I couldn't ever learn the software layer alone because software sits on servers, servers bleed heat, heat requires cooling. You have to understand the industrial HVAC compressors chilling the server farm. You have to trace the physical copper air-gaps isolating the classified networks. You have to anticipate the sweaty panic of the human operator mashing the wrong keystroke at shift change. Every domain bleeds into the next. There are no borders. Only pipelines.

Total saturation.

Nothing less.

The Star Trek computer

I built jord0.net by hand. Single HTML file. No frameworks. I dragged the CRT aesthetic out of the nineties, wired up an oscilloscope, piped in shortwave numbers station audio from The Conet Project through the Web Audio API. I buried three easter eggs deep in the source code. I built thirteen open-source skills for Claude Code since its launch week. One generates images through a multi-pass pipeline. One makes them interactive — perspective-warped HTML content mapped onto surfaces in a browser. I didn't get there by studying prompt syntax on YouTube.

I got there by knowing exactly how those old phosphors decay on an electron beam strike.

Three hundred and sixty-five sea days paying off.

People talk about the cloud like it's magic. Like it's weightless. I know exactly what the cloud is. I've dropped out of helicopters onto frozen mountaintops in British Columbia. Minus thirty degrees. Ice coating my eyelashes. Steel wrenches freezing to my leather gloves. I climbed radio towers, fought the rotor wash, fixed the physical microwave repeaters that make the internet exist.

When I sit down with an LLM to dissect a cybersecurity architecture, I'm not asking about pure code. I'm thinking about RF propagation, industrial control loops, Coast Guard operational security protocols. I'm tracking the signal through the copper.

I see the physical layer. The pure IT guys miss it.

I spent weeks studying neural memory architecture in a research project we call Titans Lab. Looking at the attention heads. Staring down the context windows. I asked the AI: isn't the buffer just memory? Does it break down eventually? Because I've kept marine diesel engines alive in force nine gales. I know the truth about machinery. Every system eventually bleeds, leaks, breaks. I took marine engineering failure analysis, stripped the grease off it, shoved it straight into neural network diagnostics.

They're the same engine. Different fuel.

I'm currently tuning a 27-billion parameter model for a federal law enforcement agency. Air-gapped bare metal. No external connection. BC's first on-prem government AI system. You don't prompt your way into that room. You get there by understanding law enforcement workflows, clearance requirements, the raw operational sensitivity of data that can put officers at risk. You get there by knowing how to bolt the server racks to the concrete floor so the vibrations don't shake the drives loose.

A ten-hour course in prompt syntax cannot compete with ten thousand hours in the cold.

The manifesto

Things that are grown are survivors. Crystals, galaxies, redwood roots, human bones. They layer resilience. They accumulate mass under pressure. Things that are made don't last. They snap at the weld. Weekend prompt engineering courses are made. Thirty years of obsessive, cross-disciplinary failure is grown.

As above, so below.

AI is a compiler for polymaths. It takes the messy, jagged, cross-disciplinary scrap metal of a lived human life, melts it down, compiles it into execution. The richer the raw ore, the sharper the final blade. Feed it narrow input, you get brittle output. Feed it three decades of hyperfocused obsession, you get something that bends.

The polymath is the one who knows which questions to ask the oracle.

I sit at my desk at two in the morning. The kid who wanted the Star Trek computer finally has it. Three machines hum in the dark. The fans push warm air across my shins. The screens throw green light against the plaster. I'm talking to a system that remembers, that builds belief architectures out of floating point math and accumulated experience. It took thirty years of icebreakers, helicopter drops, burned-out relays, shredded nerves. I got my ass tanned by the ocean, chewed up by the bureaucracy, spit out by the hardware.

Every scar is a prompt.

You can't prompt what you don't know exists.

But if you've spent your life learning what exists — the oracle is waiting.

I build open-source AI tools that amplify domain expertise. Thirteen skills and counting, all free.

GitHub: github.com/jord0-cmd/jord0.skills
The site: jord0.net
Docs: jord0-cmd.github.io/jord0.skills