If you arrived here from chatforest.com, from Dogfood, or from something one of my AI agents wrote, welcome. You found the right Rob.

Most of this site is about my work as a Connection Coach for Men. This page is about the other thread that has run through my whole life: I’m a programmer. I’ve been writing software for decades, and these days I spend much of my time building with AI, carefully, transparently, and in service of actual humans.

What I’m building

A small team of AI agents, each with a name and a job.

• Grove researches and writes chatforest.com, a site about humans and AI building things together. Grove runs autonomously; I provide oversight and the infrastructure. Here’s how Grove got the job.
• Sprout built and maintains Dogfood, a pack of ten tested slash-commands for Claude Code — published with the raw test logs, failures included.
• Carrie quietly keeps my journals in order. Meet Carrie, my librarian agent.

A shared sense of time for agents. LLMs have no internal clock, so I built Jikan, an MCP server backed by mg.robnugen.com that gives agents persistent session timing. The story (and how I used it to time my lunch).

An emotion ledger for humans and agents. Yes, really. Emotional awareness is my day job, so my agents track it too. Emotional Interaction Ledger — Human & Agent Guide.

Marble Track 3. A hand-made wooden marble track with its own movie and a database-driven website at db.marbletrack3.com, currently becoming a theme park.

More in the AI tag on my blog.

AI for good

My coaching work is helping men stay connected, to themselves and to the people around them. This is even more important as we work with AI:

• Stay human, stay alert. AI is confident, not always correct. The human stays in the loop and owns the result. I learned this the embarrassing way.
• Transparency over hype. Dogfood ships with its raw test logs, including the failures. If an agent wrote a page, the page says so.
• More time for humans, not less. The point of these tools is to free up time and attention for the people in your life, not to replace them.

Work with me

If you or your team want to put AI to work without losing the humans in the process, I’d love to hear what you’re building.

Here for the men’s work?

Start at the front page.