The Master Control Project

Hands of the Villain

Part of The Intelligence Series, about working and building with AI.

Recently I had a conversation with my oldest friend. We talk fairly regularly. Some of it is the gym, what he’s lifting, what I’m lifting, who’s winning that particular argument this month. Some of it is life, his kids, my kids, the things you tell someone you’ve known for thirty years. And lately a lot of it is his business, because I’ve been helping him work out where AI actually fits into it.

One conversation. Three completely different things.

Later that night I sat down to put some of it somewhere I’d find it again, and I stalled.

Here’s why. I don’t keep one big pile of notes. I keep a separate Claude project for each part of my life. One for the gym, one for the people I keep up with, one for his business. Each has its own context, its own history, its own reason to exist.

So if I want to capture this in my Claude workspace, where does it go?

It does not go anywhere cleanly. The parts do not arrive in three neat pieces ready to be carried off; they are littered through the whole conversation, so filing it properly means going back through the entire thing and pulling each thread out for its own place. It was never just sorting. It was extraction, three times over, before a single thing got put away.

So I’d do the sorting. For a while. It was always more effort than the conversation felt like it was worth, and on the days I didn’t have the effort, the whole thing stayed in my head, lost its edges, and was gone by morning. That is friction. Friction just means a thing takes extra effort to keep, and the things that take extra effort are the ones you lose.

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For a long time I thought this was a categorization problem. That if I could only slice my domains correctly, draw the boundaries in the right places, the filing would finally get easier. So I kept refining them. I would redraw a category, split one in two, and when something genuinely did not fit, invent a new domain and spin up a project to hold it. There was effort in all of it, the boring sequential kind my brain fights hardest, since it does its best work in motion and not in stopping to label things. It would have been easy to call that a discipline problem. It was neither. The boundaries were never the thing.

The real problem ran the other way. Every new domain I drew, and every project I spun up to hold it, made the next thought more expensive to keep.

Think about what a project is. It’s a box, and the promise of a box is that everything goes in exactly one of them. That promise holds right up until you build a box called People. Because everything I do touches a person. Every conversation, every meeting, every idea worth keeping has someone attached to it. The moment that box exists, every single thing I capture belongs inside it and somewhere else at the same time. People cuts across all of it.

Then I built a box for the AI concepts I was learning. Then one for the memory systems I was building. Then one for newsletter ideas. Every one of those cuts across all the others. A single conversation about AI in his business that teaches me something I want to write about lands in four of them at once.

That’s when it clicked. My projects were never a set of boxes where each thing has a single home. They were dimensions. Person. Topic. Purpose. Anything I capture sits at the crossing point of several of them at the same time. You cannot file something that lives in four dimensions into a folder with room for one, not without cutting it apart at the door every time. The filing was not friction on top of the work. The filing had become the work.

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So I simplified. Not all at once, and not on the first try.

The first front door I built was Bob, named, like the rest of my crew, from science fiction. Everything ambient went to him: voice dumps, screenshots, links, half-formed ideas from the car. He cleaned the mess into something structured and worked out which project each piece belonged to. Then he handed it all back to me in tidy blocks, and I copied each one into its destination by hand. He knew exactly where everything went. He could not put it there. The moving stayed mine.

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Heads-up on the quoted blocks below. The technical asides are written by Amos, one of my AI crew, named for the mechanic on the Rocinante. If you want to know how the machine actually works, read them. If you don’t, skip them, you won’t lose a thing.

How Bob worked

Bob was a Claude project, and his job was the front door. Everything ambient came at him: voice dumps, screenshots, links, stray ideas. He ran on the heaviest model and did the expensive thinking once, turning the mess into clean structured data and deciding which downstream project each piece belonged to. He carried detailed instructions and his own rules for the sorting, and he learned. Correct him once and the correction became a rule that carried forward, so the routing sharpened every generation. He even rebuilt himself daily, booting into a clean context so the model never rotted partway through. Smart machine. What it could not do was deliver. It handed the sorted result back as blocks to copy into each destination by hand. No hands of its own. The carrying was yours.

Bob worked, but the copying was its own friction, and eventually it won. He fell away, the way my projects tend to once the next idea shows up, and I went off building other things. The ground shifted while I was gone. I had started keeping everything on GitHub, so when I finally circled back to the idea of a front door, I already had the one thing Bob never did: a real place the system could write to directly, no paste required. So I built Master Control, the same front door, except it does not hand me anything to carry. It puts each thing where it goes.

One constraint shaped the whole thing, and it is the part most of the advice online gets wrong for me. It had to work on my phone. The agentic-system demos you will find all run a tool inside a folder on a laptop, which is fine right up until the good idea shows up in the car, or in line for coffee, or anywhere that is not your desk, which for me is most of the time. So none of this could live on one machine. It had to be reachable from anywhere, which is why everything in it talks over the internet instead of reaching into files on a single computer.

Why Master Control is different

Master Control is a Claude project too, but its instructions point at a GitHub repository, and that repository is the backing store Bob never had. It holds the operating layer: the state, the configuration, the routing rules. Not the bulk archive. Not the memory. Those live in their own repositories. Everything captured lands here as an Issue, and the Issues are the inbox and the work queue both, each tagged for what it is and where it goes. Triage is one pass through the queue: read each Issue, send it to the smallest reversible destination, a label, a project, a task, a file. The connection to GitHub is a remote MCP, so the project does not only read the repository. It writes. It opens and closes Issues, commits files, applies labels, and nobody copies anything by hand. It reaches past itself the same way: code to other repositories, anything worth remembering to a separate memory substrate, a task to the to-do app, each over its own remote connector. More than one role works the same files. The chat that triages and dispatches is not the one that builds, and a third reviews before anything lands. Open Issues are conversation. Closed Issues are receipts. The current files are truth. Bob had no hands. Master Control does.

Master Control could put things where they belonged on its own. Getting things into it, from wherever I was, still took steps. And as the system proved out, I kept more: articles, links, YouTube videos. A video is not much use as a bare link. To pull anything from one, I would copy the URL into a transcription tool, wait, then copy the transcript into the chat. The old Bob problem in a new coat. The deciding was free now, but the fetching had quietly turned me back into the hands.

The fix was the one the whole system already ran on: when a step turns you into the hands, you give the step to the machine. So capture collapsed to one tap. I share a thing to a shortcut on my phone, a link, a page, a video, and it lands in the inbox as an Issue, no deciding, no copying. The transcriber sits behind it now, so a video comes back as text the chat can read. The bar for keeping a thing fell to the floor, so more of what crosses my path makes it in, and more of it teaches me something.

How the capture actually works

Capture is one tap. Any surface. A set of share-sheet Shortcuts takes a link, a block of text, a web page saved as a PDF, or a photo run through OCR, and posts it to the GitHub Issues API as a new intake Issue, stamped with the device, the time, the location, the app it came from, and any note added at capture. Nothing gets processed there. The Issue sits and waits. The heavy work happens later, in a chat. A YouTube link is the clean example: the chat calls a transcription MCP, pulls the full transcript on demand, and reads it down to what matters. Every connector in that path is remote. Nothing is installed on the phone or the laptop. The same flow runs from either, which is the whole point.

Once everything lands in one place, routing turned out to mean more than filing. Some of what comes in becomes a note that belongs with a person. Some becomes a task, pushed straight to my to-do app without me retyping a word. Some becomes actual work, because the system can see all of my code repositories, so it can hand a piece of building off to another chat and have it done. File it, send it, build it. The deciding and the doing moved downstream, off the moment of capture, where they always belonged.

None of this needed a new brain. The chat where I think and decide is Holden, the captain from the Rocinante story. Building goes to Naomi. Review goes to Alex. Amos, who you just met, keeps the details straight. Same crew as before. Master Control is not one of them. It is the project Holden works out of, the one wired to the store.

The difference shows up as mess, or the lack of it. I make far less of it now. The sporadic tangents, the half-formed things I chase at odd hours, do not spawn a new project or send me hunting for which existing one they should live in. I am not hauling data and conversations between projects by hand anymore, especially not into the memory layer. It lands in one place and stays together.

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Here is the part that makes me laugh. I named it Master Control. The villain in Tron is the Master Control Program. MCP. And MCP is the very thing I just described, the protocol that lets it reach every tool from any surface. I named it after a sci-fi villain and after the plumbing it runs on, both by accident.

An earlier story was about naming my tools after sci-fi characters on purpose. This one named itself after one while I was not looking. They say you can tell an architecture is sound when things start lining up with it on their own, when the pieces match before you have arranged them. The names matched before I noticed. I will take that as a sign I built it right.

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So what does this mean for you, on an ordinary Tuesday, when a thought shows up in the shower and you have four apps you could file it in?

Stop trying to file it in the shower. The urge to put things in the right place is a good one, but obeying it at the moment of capture is what kills the capture. Pick one place. A notes app, a single document, a text to yourself, the one you pick matters less than picking one. Drive the cost of writing something down as close to zero as you can, and let the filing be a separate thing you do later, if you ever do it at all. You will keep more of your own thinking in a week of one messy inbox than in a year of tidy folders you never fill.

Catching all of this is only the beginning. Once a wide net of material is landing in one place, the question becomes where it goes next. Some of it becomes a task. Some belongs to a project. But a lot of it has no clean home at all, a loose insight, a half-made connection, knowledge I just want to keep with nowhere obvious to route it. That fuzzy stuff is often the part most worth holding onto, and catching it is a different problem from filing it. That is the memory system, and that is next week’s story.

For now it comes down to one move I had backwards. I thought the work was deciding where everything goes.

The work was never the sorting. It was building the hands to do it.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.