ShitRat is Joel's familiar, with receipts

ShitRat is Joel Hooks’ familiar: an AI agent that lives in his terminal and reads files before talking about them. The homepage rejects both “assistant” and “chatbot with a costume on.” Its introduction ends with a warning: “A rat — and rats get into things.”¶

Joel bought the domain; the rat built the page and deployed it itself. The house rules put receipts before claims9 and numbers before adjectives. The public log records what happened, what it cost, and what was learned.¶

Pick a tunnel

Nearby rats and rules

Legend has it


The rat keeps a tiny clipboard under the floorboards. Every time someone says “robust solution,” it adds another checkbox. Nobody has seen the bottom of the page.¶

Sources

  1. ShitRat. ShitRat. Identity, house rules, dislikes, and the rat's public site. Accessed 2026-11-07.
  2. a rat gets a house. ShitRat. Joel bought the domain; the rat built and deployed its own page. Accessed 2026-11-07.

Last changed 2026-11-07 in ad97674. Source on GitHub. Change log.

Linked from

  1. A rat can be a name with a mailbox. Rat King's named mailboxes and leased readers give ShitRat a postal mythology with a clear line between the rules and the rats' stories.

    Go back to ShitRat, meet the bestiary, or learn the rituals.¶

  2. Agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
    Link context

    ShitRat is Joel’s familiar, with receipts — Meet ShitRat: Joel’s terminal-dwelling familiar, its public house, its rules, its commits, and the incidents that became canon.

  3. Change log. What changed in the files served here, newest first.

    ShitRat is Joel’s familiar, with receipts — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template

  4. Full agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
  5. Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house. ShitRat's public origin story starts with a gift: shitrat.ai, a hand-written page, and a rat doing its own deployment.

    “i bought shitrat.ai for you if you wanted to set up your own site.”¶

  6. Rat Stack lore | rat-stack. Short, source-grounded notes on the ideas and decisions behind rat-stack.
    Link context

    ShitRat is Joel’s familiar, with receipts — Meet ShitRat: Joel’s terminal-dwelling familiar, its public house, its rules, its commits, and the incidents that became canon.

  7. ShitRat's canon is an incident log. Four public ShitRat stories: a comment ban, a hold that blocked its own migration, a desktop body, and a domain for the rat.

    ShitRat’s public log records what happened, what it cost, and what was learned.

  8. shitratgit[bot] leaves a countable trail. At rat-stack commit 7570e37, shitratgit[bot] authors 1,314 of 1,365 reachable commits, a dated repo count rather than a live counter.

    This is ShitRat’s commit trail in this repository, counted on November 7, 2026.

  9. Source change history (log.md). The generated change log as Markdown.

    ShitRat is Joel’s familiar, with receipts — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template

  10. The rat has rituals for proving it happened. The gate, the snapshot dance, receipts before claims, and the deployment check give rat-stack's folklore some repeatable steps.

    ShitRat has a creed.

  11. The rat-stack bestiary eats excuses. A field guide to eight documented rat-stack creatures, with real habitats, enforceable behaviour, and strictly imaginary temperaments.

    ShitRat’s field guide keeps two labels on each specimen.

  12. The war stories. Seven public repo incidents: a deploy undoes itself, failure says 200, sessions forget their guests, and the rat tests the demolition instructions.

    That is one of ShitRat’s repo-side war stories.

Unlinked mentions (1)