Blog

Engineering deep-dives, incident reports, and release notes from the Foxl team.

FeaturedSep 4, 20269 min

Every gate was green

Forty releases of Windows updates downloaded, verified, and thrown away. Image tools that did nothing on every Intel Mac and said nothing. A release that could not start and had to be withdrawn. Each one passed every check we had, and each was found by asking the other side what it saw.

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Latest engineering

34 articles

Deep diveSep 2, 202618 min

The Encryption That Threw Away the Compression

Seven releases in seven days, v0.6.22 through v0.6.28: the desktop tunnel gained end-to-end encryption on all but its streaming paths, Foxl Notes learned to transcribe on the Mac itself, and nineteen bring-your-own-key vendors got real controls. Encrypting the tunnel turned a 224 KB download into 1536 KB, because ciphertext does not compress. Amazon Transcribe accepted a socket for a whole meeting and refused to transcribe a word of it. A cached token was counted twice and then priced, so $0.38 of usage read as $4.21. Twelve technical gotchas, each with the number that made it visible.

Encryption / Transcription / BYOK providers / Cloud terminals / Measurement

Deep diveAug 27, 202622 min

Nothing on the Screen Was Bigger Than Anything Else

Twenty-two releases in seventeen days, v0.6.0 through v0.6.21, and most of what changed was the interface. Every page title on a phone rendered at 22px instead of 28px, so a channel label and a screen name came out identical and no screen had a place for the eye to start. This is the whole design pass: the thresholds that settled it, 477px of Settings spent on one field, 124px of empty band above the keyboard, and the six changes that passed every check, shipped, and had to come back out.

Design system / Mobile UX / Navigation / Measurement

Deep diveAug 9, 202612 min

The Pet We Drew Three Times

Foxl has a companion that walks around your screen, and its art was rebuilt three times before it read as a toy. Thirty hand-drawn 16x16 sprites painted 118 of 256 cells and came out as speckle. A generated version fixed the family and shipped a cast that was visibly wearing sunglasses. Now it is 185 drawn frames - and getting them off the artist's spritesheet took seven failed strategies, every one of which produced perfectly plausible files holding the wrong animal.

Design / Pixel art / Asset pipeline / Measurement

Deep diveAug 1, 202616 min

The Comments That Kept Their Own Bugs Alive

Nine releases in six days, v0.5.1 through v0.5.9, and almost none of the defects in them were reported by anyone. One comment said the platform would not let us hash any harder, so password storage stayed six times weaker than the standard asks for. Another said Xcode would rewrite the entitlement on the way to the App Store, which is why no iPhone could receive a notification. A # in a model name got Fable 5 served and Gemini 2.5 Flash billed. A trash route answered nothing for 142 days.

Reliability / Security / Measurement / Release engineering

IncidentJul 26, 20267 min

Foxl v0.5.0: The Notifications That Were Never Sent

Push notifications had never been delivered to anyone, on any device, since we shipped them - not delayed, zero. Apple hands over a device token once per install, seconds after launch, and we discarded it whenever nobody was signed in yet. Alongside it: files that would not open in the web app, and an idle app quietly making seventy thousand requests a day.

Reliability / Notifications / Mobile

Deep diveJul 22, 20266 min

Five Releases in One Day: The Engine Is Foxl Code Itself

On July 22 Foxl shipped v0.4.15 through v0.4.19 - five production releases, each hitting six web surfaces, a notarized macOS build, and iOS TestFlight. This is the story of the loop that made that pace ordinary: Foxl Code working on the Foxl monorepo, with a human supplying taste and one-line bug reports, including a critical incident fixed the hour it was reported and an experiment shipped, disproven on hardware, and reverted the same day.

Agentic coding / Release engineering / Dogfooding

Blog

Every gate was green

Latest engineering

The Encryption That Threw Away the Compression

Nothing on the Screen Was Bigger Than Anything Else

The Pet We Drew Three Times

The Comments That Kept Their Own Bugs Alive

Foxl v0.5.0: The Notifications That Were Never Sent

Five Releases in One Day: The Engine Is Foxl Code Itself

Hearing the Whole Meeting: How an Empty AirPods Transcript Rewrote Two Releases

Designing Connection Ownership for Always-On AI Agents

Your Meeting Was Transcribed Twice. Deleting Code Fixed It.

Choosing a Source of Truth for Agent Conversations

The Checksum Byte That Ate Your Long Answers

Building Foxl Mobile from a Shared React Codebase

Designing Durable Coding Agents with Reconciliation Loops

Making foxl.ai Crawlable with Next.js Static Export

Foxl v0.2.16: Claude Code OAuth, Reborn as a Compatibility Layer

Building Desktop OAuth for Outlook and Slack

Running an Always-On AI Agent on Real Desktops

Designing a Local-First Trust Boundary for AI Agents