Russ.Cloud — The personal blog of Russ McKendrick

Latest9 Aug 202610 min readmacOS, Code, Tools

My Starship Prompt Revisited: Making Blocks Vanish Cleanly

A follow-up to my Starship setup: how I got the status and AI blocks to appear only when they matter, without leaving a powerline stub behind.

Hi, I'm Russ. I build small tools and write up what I learn.

DevOps person, author of 14 books, and lately a heavy user of AI coding agents. Writing here since 2013 — 184 posts and counting.

russ@cloud ~ $ russ --now

writing: My Starship Prompt Revisited: Making Blocks Vanish Cleanly
building: tokenuse, terminal-svg
spinning: ...And Out Come the Wolves by Rancid
topics: ai · tools · code · macos · linux

russ@cloud ~ $

Recent writing

19 Jul 202611 min read

Token Use: Coach Mode and a Week of Releases

A week after Token Use hit 1.0.0 by cutting features, it's on 1.2.2. Coach mode, a Rust port of Microsoft's AI-Engineering-Coach rules, full-text scrollback, an MCP server, and a 3D graph.

12 Jul 20268 min read

A Catch-Up: terminal-svg and Token Use v1

Two projects worth writing about: terminal-svg, a new Rust tool for pixel-perfect terminal screenshots, and Token Use finally reaching v1

13 Jun 202611 min read

Playing with Headroom: Compressing the Context Going to My AI Coding Agents

I spent a few days running Headroom, a local proxy that promises to cut the tokens your AI coding agent sends to the provider. The savings are real, but they're not where the dashboard first makes you think they are.

10 May 202611 min read

codebase-memory-mcp: Giving Claude Code (and Codex) a Map

A real Codex session with codebase-memory-mcp cost me 30p. How I set it up for Claude Code and Codex, and whether it's safe to run on your code.

1 May 202616 min read

Counting the Cost of Vibe Coding

A local-first dashboard for tracking AI coding tool spend across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini CLI - with a TUI, a desktop app, and zero API keys required.

19 Apr 20268 min read

Is my blog Agent-Ready?

Running russ.cloud through isitagentready.com and wiring up the checks that actually make sense for a static blog - Link headers, Content Signals, agent-skills discovery, llms.txt, and a tiny Cloudflare Worker to serve markdown on demand.

Listened to this week28 Sept 2026

Moonlit Outlaws and Arena Static on Festival Mud

Week 39 moves from Bowie and Floyd to Blur Tool and NIN tracing glam punk Britpop and synth haze into a bold trip through rebellion hooks and atmosphere