The connection had gone stale overnight.
Cowork, the browser surface where I sometimes ask Claude to look at my publishing numbers, talks to a small server I built. The server lives on my PC. It pulls JSON from twelve platforms every Sunday and hands it over through a Cloudflare tunnel. Tunnels generate temporary URLs. When the underlying process restarts, the URL changes. Cowork didn’t know that yet.
I found the mismatch in twenty minutes. Repasted the new URL, ran a smoke test, everything came back green.
I should have stopped there.
Instead I started asking questions. How do I make this not happen again? A freshly fixed problem has an opening in it, and I walked through. The system is open, you’re already at the keyboard, and the next improvement is right there. This is how I ended up learning about named tunnels. A named tunnel has a permanent URL. It doesn’t rotate. Claude laid out the steps and they sounded clean, and I said yes, and we started building.
This is where I should tell you that I got excited.
I am a writer who has been teaching herself to build things. Every time something works, there’s a thrill I have started to recognize and distrust. It feels like competence. It probably is competence. But it also accelerates, and by the time I thought to ask whether I actually needed a named tunnel I was already looking at domain settings.
A stable named tunnel needed a subdomain on a domain managed by Cloudflare DNS. I had a memory, vague, that lgiyer.com was already there.
We ran one command to check.
WordPress.com nameservers. Has been since the beginning.
So. Three options now. Migrate lgiyer.com off WordPress, which meant two to four hours of careful work with real risk to my site, my email, my verifications. Buy a $10 utility domain and set up a subdomain on it. Or stop entirely.
I was reaching for option two.
I typed to Claude first, not quite a question: do I actually want this? The whole tunnel was so I could have the live dashboard inside Cowork. I already run the same thing on Claude Code. This was a convenience for a browser surface I use occasionally, through a tunnel that breaks only when cloudflared restarts, which is rarely.
The response came back even: the tunnel exists almost entirely for Cowork. The Sunday task runs without it. The migration you were framing as a next step produces the same outcome on a different trigger. No upgrade.
And then: you’re a writer, not an infra person. Don’t pay for architecture you haven’t proven you’ll use weekly.
I read that again.
Two hours in, I had forgotten what I sat down to fix. The named tunnel had become the point. The dashboard it would serve had become an abstraction, and I was solving for the tunnel’s requirements now, not mine. Each step had followed cleanly from the last. Fix the broken connection, prevent it breaking again, get the permanent URL, handle the DNS. The logic was tidy. The logic was the problem.
We backed out. Closed the half-finished work. I wrote a short markdown file, five steps to restart the quick tunnel on the days I want Cowork, and pinned it to the project. The whole pullback took ten minutes.
The $10 isn’t the cost. I know that. The cost is that future me has to remember the domain exists, renew it, tell every new tool about it, and six months from now wonder what she was originally solving for. Infrastructure decisions are ongoing relationships. You don’t enter them by accident.
How reasonable it felt from inside, though. Each step followed from the last, the logic clean and self-contained, and not once did any of it ask: is this still the thing you came here to do?
There’s a phrase that shows up in these moments: right architecture. It sounds like the adult choice. It sounds like the difference between someone who builds real systems and someone who cobbles. I am, genuinely, someone who cobbles. I have made peace with that. The tools I use now can reach past what I could build alone, and they do, and sometimes that reach runs a little ahead of where I actually need to go.
Staying in my lane is not a limitation I’ve accepted. It is a decision I have to keep making.
Saturday I made it about two hours too late. That’s fine. The markdown file is there. The domain is not.
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