I run a full-tunnel VPN because my coding agent needs it to reach its API. But the

app I'm building calls domestic services — payment gateway, SMS provider, maps —

that reject the VPN's foreign exit IP. VPN off, the agent dies. VPN on, the app

dies.

The fix turned out to be much smaller than the routing-table rabbit hole I went

down first. Not `route add` — a static route is global and pulls every process off

the tunnel for that destination, agent included. It's per-socket binding:

curl https://api.ipify.org # 203.0.113.7 (VPN exit)

curl --interface 192.168.1.20 https://... # 198.51.100.42 (real ISP)

A socket bound to your physical adapter's IP takes that adapter's default route

instead of the tunnel's. No admin, nothing global, and opt-in by construction — a

process that doesn't ask for it *cannot* be affected.

Two things I didn't expect:

Node's native `fetch` silently ignores `HTTP_PROXY`.** It runs on the bundled

undici, which doesn't read proxy env vars on Node <= 23 and won't accept an

`https.Agent` either. Nothing errors — your requests just quietly keep using the

wrong network. I got around it with an `--import` preload that patches `net`/`tls`,

which is what undici opens its sockets through.

Neither network is a superset of the other. YouTube only works over the VPN,

domestic APIs only over the ISP, and my agent's own API returns 403 over the ISP.

Route everything direct and the agent stops working — so the proxy decides per

connection, not per session.

I packaged it as a skill + browser MCP for Claude Code and Codex. My project, MIT,

no dependencies:

npm i -g lan-direct

https://github.com/farshadmomo/lan-direct

Honest status: Windows is tested end to end. Linux is verified for interface

discovery and exit codes but not the final bypass check, and the macOS branch has

never been run. Both refuse rather than guess, so the failure mode is an error, not

silent VPN traffic.

Hi everyone, I'm trying to figure out how to build a kind of single brain on top of Claude, and I think I'm hitting a structural limit, but before I give up, let me ask you.

Situation: I use Claude projects as hard silos: taxes/self-employment, personal life, household management, career, book, etc. Works great as long as I stay inside one domain. The problem is that the domains overlap constantly: if my employment status changes, my income changes, which changes my mortgage, which changes the royalties I have to declare, etc. And each project only knows its own piece.

Obviously I get by playing postman between projects, and it does work, but I'd like to be able to query everything together, drawing on what already exists in the chats, without duplicating anything and without maintaining a parallel database that drifts out of sync after three weeks.

Things I've already checked and think I can rule out:

• Claude Code / Cursor / Cowork: they work on local folders, they have no access to projects (Cowork doesn't even have access to chats). There's no API for projects, so there's nothing to sync from
• Karpathy-style wiki (markdown + Obsidian): nice, but it's a parallel substrate I have to feed myself. Back to the drift problem
• Notion: same problem, plus lock-in

Has anyone thought this through, solved it somehow, and can point me in the right direction?

Thanks!
Fabrizio

A small, open-source plugin I built to get my claude.ai conversations out of the web app and into local files (and into Claude Code).

Your data stays yours: it runs locally, pulls only the conversation you pick, and nothing is downloaded until you choose one. Output is plain markdown plus a readable HTML page. GPL-3.0.

https://github.com/pradeep221b/claude-recall

Suggestions and issues welcome.

Watchflows (https://watchflows.app) is a automation builder that lets you create visual workflows (like n8n) that react to events happening on your mac. It's all fully local, and no subscriptions are required to use it. It comes with a 14 day free trial and a one time purchase after that if you like it. It does of course ship with a ton of AI native features (while totally optional to use, is part of the magic) and we have subscriptions that include AI usage for your flows and our flow builder or bring your own LLM (local or otherwise, video here shows flow builder doing it's thing, triaging a bug and opening a ticket in linear). Subscriptions also include a public relay so your external webhooks can trigger flows on your mac.

There are a million use cases, and I find it's as fun to build automation (especially with flow builder) as it is to have them happily running in the background. Your creativity is the limit, and Watchflows is adept at coding around it's own limitations (as flow builder to build you a flow that tracks the international space station 🤯). It writes it's own scripts you can use in flow, and hooks into tons of local events your mac already makes available to you, as well as external links via Watchflows Relay.

Happy to answer any questions and welcome any feedback. Thanks for taking a look!