There Is an App for That — Until There Isn't

Digital health applications and psychotherapy follow different capacity, evidence, and reimbursement paths. Baumol’s cost disease explains one pressure on labour-intensive care; it does not explain a particular German fee decision or establish that an app substitutes for a therapist.

7 April 2026 · 6 min · Sebastian Spicker

Automate the Boring Stuff: Setlist to Playlist

I love concerts. I love setlists. I hate building the playlist manually afterward. But do I really? A small automation project, a Deftones show in Dortmund, and the question of whether you should automate something you kind of enjoy.

10 February 2026 · 6 min · Sebastian Spicker

Constraining the Coding Agent: The Ralph Loop and Why Determinism Matters

In late 2025, agentic coding tools went from impressive demos to daily infrastructure. The problem nobody talked about enough: when an LLM agent has write access to a codebase and no formal constraints, reproducibility breaks down. The Ralph Loop is a story-driven harness intended to bound that variability through one model invocation per attempt, scoped writes, and atomic state. These constraints make runs easier to inspect; they do not make an unpinned model deterministic.

4 December 2025 · 10 min · Sebastian Spicker

The Papertrail: AI PDF Renaming and the Tokens That Make It Interesting

Everyone has a Downloads folder full of “scan0023.pdf” and “document(3)-final-FINAL.pdf”. Renaming them by content sounds trivial — read the file, understand what it is, give it a name. The implementation reveals something useful about how LLMs actually handle text: what a token is, why context windows matter in practice, why you want structured output instead of prose, and why heuristics should go first. The repository is at github.com/sebastianspicker/AI-PDF-Renamer.

22 March 2025 · 9 min · Sebastian Spicker