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AI makes us faster, but does it make us better engineers, or just more dependent? As a follow-up...

Over the past year, I've noticed something interesting in conversations about enterprise AI. Most...

As of June 1, 2026, all GitHub Copilot plans run on usage-based billing. Premium request units are gone. What replaced them is a token-metered currency called GitHub AI Credits: one credit equals one cent, and every model interaction converts into credits based on the input, output, and cached tokens it consumes, charged at each model's published rate. GitHub's framing is that Copilot outgrew its old pricing. A one-line completion and a multi-hour autonomous run used to cost the same, and once agentic use went mainstream, that flat rate stopped matching the compute behind it. Tying the price to tokens fixes the mismatch. If your Copilot use is mostly autocomplete, this barely registers. If you drive Copilot as an agent from the terminal, it changes which moves cost money. Here's the practical shape of it. Requests out, tokens in Old model: each interaction cost one premium request, scaled by a per-model multiplier, drawn from a monthly request allowance. New model: each interaction costs whatever its tokens cost on the model you picked. Every paid plan still ships with a monthly pool, now denominated in credits, with the option to set a budget for usage past it. Published figures put the included pool at 1,500 credits for Pro, 7,000 for Pro+, and 20,000 for Max, with pooled per-user allowances on Business and Enterprise. Worth knowing if you pay yearly: annual Pro and Pro+ subscribers stay on the request-based model until the term ends, and several model multipliers went up for them on June 1. An annual plan doesn't dodge the change. It postpones part of it while making the strong models eat more of the old allowance. Autocomplete is untouched Before anyone starts rationing, here's the part that didn't move. Inline completions and Next Edit Suggestions are still unlimited and still free. If your day is mostly tab-completion in the editor, your costs read identical to May. Nothing to monitor there. The meter lands on the rest: chat, and especially the agentic runs th

Hi 👋 fellow devs Sorry for such a big gap since my last article...... Life got a bit hectic, but I am finally back in action! You know how it goes. We spend so much of our energy obsessing over the flashy side of tech. We talk about gorgeous UI designs, smooth animations, and whatever frontend framework is trending on GitHub this week. But let’s be completely real for a second. What actually keeps your favorite apps from melting down when millions of people hit the refresh button at the exact same moment? That is exactly what we are going to unpack today. We are pulling back the curtain on the quiet, brilliant backstage crew of infrastructure tools. You see their logos all over tech Twitter and hear senior engineers drop their names in meetings like secret handshakes, but today, we are stripping away the corporate fluff. We will break down eight legendary backend technologies using conversational paragraphs and quick bullet points so you can finally master what they actually do. Let’s dive right in. 1. Redis Traditional databases live on hard drives. They are fantastic for keeping your data safe and organized permanently, but pulling data off a physical drive takes time. If your application has to wander deep into those database aisles to fetch the exact same piece of information every single second, your entire system starts to stall. To understand how Redis fixes this, imagine you are studying for a brutal exam. Your massive, 1,000-page textbook represents your main database. It holds every single answer, but flipping through the pages continuously is incredibly slow. Redis is the digital equivalent of writing the core formulas you need on a neon sticky note and taping it directly to your monitor. It keeps critical data sitting directly inside the system's lightning-fast short-term memory. You will typically find Redis stepping in to handle operations like: Session Management: Keeping users logged into an application without checking the main database on every cli

This is an adapted English version of an article I first wrote in Japanese. I work with AI to shape and review my drafts, but the argument and the field observations are my own. The numbers are cited from public surveys (linked at the end). I built an aggressive prompt-injection block to stop my AI agent from repeating the same mistakes. It worked, so I kept adding rules. By the time I noticed, the file had ballooned to 56,000 characters — and the agent had quietly stopped functioning. Too much context, attention spread too thin to act on any of it. I gutted it back to under 1,200 characters, and here's the part that still stings: it behaved better with fewer rules. That was the day I learned my whole mental model was backwards. This isn't a post about making your AI more accurate. It's about designing so that accuracy stops being the thing you depend on. The mistake I made for months My agent kept skipping the same step in a workflow. So I did what every engineer does on instinct: I added a rule. "Don't skip this step." Then it did something else dumb, so I added another rule. Then another. I was treating the rules file like a conversation with a colleague — as if the agent would remember yesterday's correction and carry it forward. It doesn't. Every run starts cold. "Be careful next time" assumes a next time that shares state with this time. For a stateless model, there is no continuity to appeal to. You are talking to a counterparty with no memory of the conversation you think you're having. So the rules pile up, because each correction feels like progress. And for a while the numbers even improve. But adding rules has a ceiling, and I blew straight through it: at 56,000 characters the agent wasn't reasoning over my guardrails anymore — it was drowning in them. Knowing a rule and stopping at it are different things Here's the distinction that took me far too long to see. Putting a rule in the context window means the model knows the rule. It does not mean the mod

If you've shipped software in the last three years, you've probably watched your job description...

Every developer I know has the same problem: knowledge scattered across five places at once. Browser bookmarks they never re-read. Notion docs that become graveyards. Slack threads with critical context that disappear into the archive. README files that contradict each other. Stack Overflow answers bookmarked with zero recall of why. I tried most of the "second brain" setups and none of them stuck until I figured out why they kept failing: generic productivity systems are not built for how developers actually think and work. A developer's knowledge is fundamentally different from a writer's or a manager's. It is: Code-linked (a note about a library is useless without the actual code it explains) Decision-heavy (architecture decisions need context, rationale, and alternatives considered) Debugging-intensive (solutions to bugs need the exact error message, environment, and what you tried) Time-sensitive (that API migration note is only relevant for a 3-month window) Here is the structure that actually worked. The Core Structure 00-Inbox/ 10-Projects/ 20-Areas/ - Language: Python/ - Stack: AWS/ - Domain: Auth/ 30-Resources/ - Libraries/ - Tools/ - Patterns/ 40-Archive/ The key insight: Resources are evergreen, Projects are temporary, Areas are ongoing responsibilities. A note about how JWT works lives in 30-Resources/Domain-Auth/ . A note about implementing JWT for the current sprint lives in 10-Projects/Sprint-42-Auth-Revamp/ . When the sprint is done, the project gets archived. The JWT fundamentals note stays forever. The Templates That Made It Click Architecture Decision Record (ADR) # ADR-042: Use Postgres over DynamoDB for user sessions Status: Accepted | Date: 2026-06-22 ## Context We need session storage that supports complex queries for the audit log feature. ## Decision Postgres with connection pooling via PgBouncer. ## Alternatives Considered - DynamoDB: rejected (query limitations for audit log requirements) - Redis: rejected (not durable enough for complian

Hey DEV community! 👋 How many times a day do you need to format a messy JSON string, convert a CSV file, or parse a timestamp? And how many times do you find yourself pasting that data—which might contain API keys, user emails, or proprietary code—into a random website you found on Google? We’ve all done it, but in an era of constant data leaks, it’s a massive security risk. That’s exactly why I built Parsify . What is Parsify? Parsify is an all-in-one data converter and developer toolset designed to handle your daily formatting, parsing, and data manipulation tasks completely offline and client-side. No servers, no tracking, and absolutely no data leaks. Everything happens right inside your browser sandbox. 🚀 Key Features 100% Secure & Offline: Your data never leaves your local machine. Once the page loads, you can literally pull your internet plug and it will still work perfectly. All-in-One Toolkit: No more bookmarking ten different sites for ten different tasks. From JSON formatting and base64 encoding to data conversions, it’s all under one roof. Built for Speed: A clean, lightning-fast UI with batch-processing support to keep your workflow uninterrupted. Privacy by Design: Zero tracking scripts, zero ads, and zero database logging. Why I Built It Most online utilities are bloated with tracking pixels, pop-up ads, and cookies. Worse, you have no idea what happens to the data you paste into their input fields. As a developer, I wanted a tool that felt like a local desktop app but possessed the accessibility of a web app. Parsify is the bridge. It gives you the convenience of a web utility with the strict security boundaries of local execution. Check It Out (It's Free!) If you’re tired of compromising on data privacy for quick utilities, give it a spin: 👉 parsify.tools I’m actively working on adding more tools and converters to the suite. I would absolutely love to get the DEV community's feedback! What converters or formatting utilities do you use daily that you

Contacts are messier than they look. A user's real address book is spread across the people they've saved by hand, the people they've emailed often enough that the provider auto-collected them, and the colleagues in their company directory. Google exposes these through the People API; Microsoft through Graph; both model the data differently and split it across sources you have to query separately. The Nylas Contacts API unifies all of that behind one schema and one grant_id . You read saved contacts, auto-collected contacts, and directory contacts through the same endpoint, create and update entries that sync back to the provider, and organize them into groups. This post walks the contact surface from the HTTP API and the Nylas CLI , which mirrors every operation for terminal use. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I run when I'm exploring an address book. The contact model and its three sources A contact in Nylas carries the fields you'd expect — given_name , surname , emails , phone_numbers , company_name , job_title , notes — plus richer ones like im_addresses , physical_addresses , and web_pages . The schema is the same across providers, so a Google contact and a Microsoft contact deserialize into one struct. The detail that trips people up is source . Every contact has one of three sources, and they mean very different things: address_book — contacts the user saved deliberately. This is the real address book. inbox — contacts the provider auto-collected because the user emailed them. These were never explicitly saved. domain — contacts from the organization's directory (coworkers). Knowing the source matters because "all contacts" usually isn't what you want. If you're building a contact picker, the inbox source can flood it with one-off recipients the user doesn't think of as contacts. Filter by source deliberately. See the Contacts API overview for the full data model. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key and a connected accou

Meeting notes are the feature everyone wants and nobody wants to build. The hard part isn't the summary — an LLM handles that. The hard part is getting into the meeting: a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, survives each platform's waiting room and admission flow, records cleanly, and produces a transcript you can feed downstream. Each provider has its own join mechanics, and none of them ships a tidy "record this meeting" API. The Nylas Notetaker API is that bot as a service. You point it at a meeting link, it joins on schedule, records, and generates a transcript, and you fetch the recording and transcript through one endpoint. This post walks the Notetaker surface from the HTTP API and the Nylas CLI , which mirrors the whole lifecycle for terminal use and quick testing. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are exactly what I run when I'm testing a notetaker against a live meeting. Two ways to run a notetaker: grant-scoped or standalone Before any code, there's one architectural choice worth understanding, because it changes the endpoint you call. A grant-scoped notetaker is tied to a connected account and lives under /v3/grants/{grant_id}/notetakers . Use it when the bot acts on behalf of a specific user — it can read that user's calendar and join their meetings as them. A standalone notetaker has no grant at all and lives under /v3/notetakers . You hand it a raw meeting link and it joins, no connected account required. This is the one to reach for when you just have a URL and want a recording — a public webinar, a meeting on an account you haven't connected, or a system that deals in links rather than users. Same request body, same lifecycle, same media output; the only difference is whether there's a grant_id in the path. See the Notetaker overview for how both models fit together. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key. If you're using a grant-scoped notetaker you also need a connected account; for standalone, the API key al

Half a year ago I asked a simple question: during an online call, could a short, to-the-point hint appear on my screen in a second or two — while the other person is still talking? Not an after-the-fact transcript, but help in the moment. The result is a desktop assistant (macOS + Windows). Below is an honest breakdown of what turned out to be hard, and which solutions worked. Engineering only, no marketing. Architecture in one paragraph On the device there are only two things: audio capture and a thin UI overlay. All the "brains" (provider keys, prompts, model selection) live on the server. The client gets a short-lived per-session token and streams audio; the server returns the transcript and the generated answer. I picked this split not for "security theater" but because otherwise keys and prompts would have to be baked into the binary — and both leak instantly. Hard part #1: system audio, not the microphone The mic only captures you. You need the other party's audio — i.e. the system output. And that's where the platform pain starts: macOS. For a long time there was no native "give me system audio" API; the classic path was a virtual audio device (BlackHole/Soundflower-style) or, in recent versions, ScreenCaptureKit, which can hand you a process's audio. ScreenCaptureKit turned out to be the best option: no kernel extensions for the user to install. Windows. WASAPI loopback saves you — you can grab whatever is going to the output device, without virtual cables. Takeaway: "system audio capture" is not one feature but two different subsystems for two OSes, and most of the early bugs were about permissions and device selection, not about audio itself. Hard part #2: latency is everything A hint that arrives 6 seconds late is useless — the conversation has already moved on. The latency budget has three parts: STT (speech → text). Streaming only. Batch "recognize after the phrase ends" immediately adds 1–2 seconds. The key metrics weren't "overall accuracy on a benchm

Choosing a learning path is one of the most critical decisions you make as a beginner. When I set out to learn web development, I knew exactly what I needed: resources that were thorough, accessible 24/7, and completely free—both online and in print. Before settling on my 2026 learning path, I experimented with a few popular options. Here is a look at what I tried, why they didn’t quite stick, and where I ultimately landed. What Didn’t Work for Me Scrimba Scrimba offers highly interactive introductory courses in web development. However, I realized a bit too late that the platform isn't entirely free; a paywall kicks in shortly after you begin the core HTML and CSS sections. Because I was looking for fully open resources, I had to move on. Frontend Mentor Frontend Mentor is an excellent platform for practicing UI design, but it operates on a freemium model. While the basic learning paths are free, accessing project solutions, starter files, and advanced challenges requires a paid upgrade. 100Devs 100Devs is a free, self-paced, community-taught bootcamp led by Leon Noel. Originally broadcast live on Twitch, the full 30-week course repository is now available on YouTube and communitytaught.org. I actually joined the inaugural cohort in 2020 and attempted subsequent restarts. Leon is an engaging instructor, but the live-stream format presents some hurdles for self-paced learners. The videos are several hours long and include significant time spent interacting with the live chat, managing stream tangents, and breaking away from the core curriculum. Ultimately, the pacing made it difficult for me to stay focused and build momentum. (Note: I also found myself misaligned with some of the community’s culture and leadership choices over time, which made it easier to look for a fresh start elsewhere.) What did I choose? Ultimately, I chose The Odin Project (TOP) as my primary framework, and I couldn't be happier with the decision. The Odin Project checks every single box for

Tools Full comparisons and context in my 2026 AI tech stack post . This is just what you need installed to follow the workflow below. Claude Code If you're new, start with the cheat sheet and Anthropic best practices . Security — set this up first: Claude Code Security Hooks — 7-layer prompt injection defence, read guards, canary files Lock down your .env and any git-secret files in .claude/settings.local.json before anything else MCP: Context7 — library/API docs on demand DeepWiki — open source repo documentation Skills: Matt Pocock's skill set — /grill-me , /handoff , /improve-codebase-architecture (covered in detail below) Understand Anything — interactive code knowledge graphs Ponytail — laziest-senior-dev heuristic, pairs well with /improve-codebase-architecture Agents: DocsExplorer — handles docs lookup in a subagent without polluting main context Hooks / proxies: rtk — token reduction proxy, single Rust binary UI: Claude HUD — status bar showing model, context size, active tools and agents Other tools JetBrains — for git, debugging and reviewing Claude's changes; Claude Code plugin Warp.dev — terminal; Warp Oz for hands-off tasks, Claude Code for hands-on Process As I've mentioned in previous posts, my workflow is typically very different from what you'll see in the hype and social media posts. I don't typically work on monorepo, single stack, single language projects. My clients are typically full-on microservices with multiple languages and stacks. And beyond that, I still prefer IDEs over fancy pluggable text-editors, which often means I can't keep all the projects single scoped. What this means is that current favourites like Air , Conductor , and Antigravity don't work for me. So I've been solving my own problems, and this process I'm sharing today allows me to employ multiple agents working mostly independently on different repos towards a singular goal. I treat my agents like I would juniors or contractors; trust but verify. I give them tasks, but I ha

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A great CLAUDE.md is not the longest one. It is the one where every line changes what Claude does. The whole skill is knowing what belongs in it — and, just as importantly, what does not. The sections that earn their place Start with a one or two line project description and your stack, with version numbers. Claude infers a lot from your code, but it will not guess that you are on Next.js 15 instead of 14, or which ORM you chose. Then a directory map — not every file, just the top-level layout with a note on what each part holds. After that: the build and test commands, the conventions a formatter does not enforce, and critically, the things not to touch. # Project: Acme Dashboard Next.js 15 (App Router), TypeScript, Drizzle ORM, Vitest. ## Structure src/app/ # routes and pages src/lib/ # shared utilities, db client db/migrations/ # generated - never hand-edit ## Commands Build: npm run build Test: npm run test ## Conventions - API routes return { data, error } - never throw to client - Server components by default ## Do not touch - db/migrations/ is generated. Never edit by hand. Every line in that file would cause a mistake if removed. That is the bar. What to leave out This is where most files go wrong. Two kinds of content waste your budget: Personality instructions. "Act as a senior engineer," "think step by step," "be thorough." These feel productive but change nothing — Claude already does them. General advice that does not prevent a specific mistake is pure noise. Rules a tool already enforces. If you have a formatter or linter, do not restate what it enforces. Wire it into a hook instead, and keep CLAUDE.md for what tools cannot enforce. The one-line test For every line, ask: "If I remove this, will Claude make a mistake?" If yes, keep it. If no, delete it. This single question, applied ruthlessly, is the difference between a file Claude follows and one it ignores. A bloated file buries the rules that matter in noise, so Claude cannot tell which line is the

If you use Claude Code, there is one file that quietly shapes every session: CLAUDE.md. Most developers either do not have one or have one that works against them. Here is what it actually is, in plain terms. The file Claude reads every session CLAUDE.md is a markdown file that Claude Code reads at the start of every conversation. Think of it as your project's constitution — the source of truth for how your specific repository works. Because Claude reads it every time, you stop re-explaining your stack, your conventions, and your commands on every task. Why it exists Without a CLAUDE.md, every session starts cold. Claude can read your code, but it cannot infer the things that live outside the code: that you are on Next.js 15 and not 14, that a directory is generated and must never be edited, that your team has a particular commit style. You end up explaining these again and again, slightly differently each time, so the output drifts. CLAUDE.md captures that knowledge once, somewhere Claude always sees it. Where it lives, and how to start Put CLAUDE.md in the root of your project. You do not have to write it from a blank page — the /init command analyses your codebase and generates a starter, detecting your build tools, test framework, and existing patterns: $ claude > /init Treat the result as a foundation, not a finished product. The real value comes from refining it as you learn what Claude gets wrong without guidance. What belongs in it A good CLAUDE.md is short and specific: A one-line stack description, with versions — Claude will not guess Next.js 15 over 14 A directory map — the top-level layout and what each part holds The build and test commands The conventions a newcomer could not infer from the code A "do not touch" section — generated files, migrations, protected paths Here is a compact example: # Project: Acme Dashboard Next.js 15 (App Router), TypeScript, Drizzle ORM, Vitest. ## Structure src/app/ # routes and pages db/migrations/ # generated - never h

You wrote a detailed CLAUDE.md, and Claude Code still gets things wrong — wrong convention, touches files it should not, ignores rules you clearly wrote down. The cause is almost never that the rules are missing. It is that they are buried. The over-specified file problem CLAUDE.md loads into Claude's context every single session, and performance degrades as that context fills. When the file grows too long, something counterintuitive happens: Claude starts ignoring parts of it. The important rules get lost in the noise, and the genuinely critical instructions sit too deep to reliably influence output. A bloated file does not just waste tokens. It actively makes Claude less reliable, because it cannot tell which of your hundred lines is the one that matters. The trap of good intentions It always starts reasonably: "let me put everything relevant in here." But relevant is a low bar. The file grows until it is impossible to scan, full of duplication, and so noisy that the truly important rules carry no weight. More content felt like more control. It was the opposite. The fix: prune ruthlessly Run every line through one question: "If I remove this, will Claude make a mistake?" If the answer is no, the line is noise — delete it. And if something only matters in a specific situation rather than always, it does not belong in the always-loaded file at all. That is what skills and subdirectory CLAUDE.md files are for — they load on demand, only when relevant. Let Claude fetch what it needs Instead of embedding everything, tell Claude how to pull context when it needs it. Rather than pasting an entire API guide into the file: # Wasteful - embeds the whole file every session: @docs/api-guide.md # Better - Claude reads it only when relevant: For Stripe integration work, read docs/stripe-guide.md The second form costs almost nothing until the moment it is needed. The result A pruned CLAUDE.md is often a third of the length and many times more effective. The rules that matter are

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I bombed a system design interview last year — not because I didn't know the architecture, but because I spent the first 5 minutes fighting Excalidraw. So I built SystemDesignBoard — a free, keyboard-first whiteboard specifically for system design interviews. What it does You open it, press a key, and start drawing. No account, no onboarding, no drag-from-a-sidebar friction. R → place a Service node C → place a Database/Cache/Queue A → connect two nodes N → open the scratchpad for scale math The features I'm most proud of Animated connectors that show communication type Instead of just drawing arrows, connectors visually encode how services talk: ⇄ sync — paired dashes (request + ACK) ≋ stream — near-solid fast line with glow (continuous pipeline) This matters in interviews — your interviewer can glance at your diagram and immediately understand the communication pattern. Cloud provider badges Tag any node as AWS (EC2, Lambda, RDS, S3), GCP (GKE, Cloud Run, Firestore), or Azure. Each subtype has its own icon. Trade-off logging Right-click any node → Log Trade-offs → attach your CAP theorem stance, consistency level, and scaling strategy directly to the component. Diagram-as-Code Type: [Mobile App] -> [API Gateway] [API Gateway] -> [Auth Service] [Auth Service] -> [Users DB] [Feed Service] -> [Posts DB x3] [Feed Service] -> [Redis Cache] Hit Apply — it auto-lays out the whole architecture in seconds. Export to animated GIF Export your diagram as a GIF that shows live traffic flow animations. Great for sharing after an interview or in a design doc. Tech stack React + TypeScript + Vite @xyflow/react (ReactFlow v12) for the canvas Zustand + Immer for state with full undo/redo html-to-image + gifshot for PNG/GIF export It's free and open No signup required. Works entirely in the browser. Free during beta. 👉 systemdesignboard.com Would love feedback — especially from anyone who's done system design interviews recently. What's missing? What's annoying? Drop a comment below