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Image by upklyak on Magnific Run an application. Click a few buttons. If the terminal doesn't have errors, then everything is working. Right? What's the point of writing tests if all seems to be fine. Let's explore testing discipline and why it's a habit every developer should build early. What is Testing Discipline? Testing discipline is the habit of verifying that your code works. It's not something you do at the end of a project. It's something you build into your development process. The goal is simple. Catch bugs as early as possible. A bug found while writing code usually takes minutes to fix. The same bug found in production can take hours to investigate, reproduce, and resolve. The earlier you find problems, the less expensive they become. Different Types of Tests When people talk about testing, they're usually referring to three categories. The first is unit testing . A unit test checks a single piece of functionality, usually a function or method. These tests are fast and easy to write, making them the best place for beginners to start. Next are integration tests . These verify that different parts of your application work together correctly. For example, does your service communicate properly with the database? Finally, there are end-to-end tests . These simulate a real user interacting with the application from start to finish. They provide the most realistic results but are usually slower and more complex. As a beginner, I recommend that you should focus on unit tests first. Different Testing Approaches As you continue learning, you'll come across different testing methodologies. One of the most popular is Test-Driven Development , often called TDD. The idea is simple. Write the test first. Watch it fail. Write enough code to make it pass. Many developers like this approach because it forces them to think about requirements before writing implementation details. You may also hear about Behaviour-Driven Development , or BDD. This approach focuses on desc

Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly noticed something through my network: more people from non-technical backgrounds are building software as AI tooling improves. Designers are prototyping product ideas. Product managers are testing workflows. Founders are building MVPs. Operators are creating internal tools. People who would not have called themselves “technical” a year ago are now using AI to make ideas tangible. I think this is genuinely exciting. It has never been easier to create. I even attended a hackathon where participants only had 20 minutes to build a demoable product! This raises the question: When AI makes building easier, how do we make sure understanding does not disappear? I recently published Thinking in the Age of AI , a guide for software engineers (you can check out my previous post here ). That guide focused on individual reflection for engineers: how to keep developing technical intuition, reasoning, and judgment while using AI tools. But the landscape has changed quickly. AI-assisted building is no longer only an engineering workflow. It is becoming a builder workflow accessible to all. And by builders, I mean anyone using AI to turn ideas into software-like artifacts: vibe coders designers product managers founders operators marketers students non-engineering team members So I wanted to create a new version of the system for this wider builder audience. Thinking in the Age of AI: Builder Edition The opportunity is real I do not think we should dismiss this shift. I have spoken with people from all kinds of backgrounds who are actively building now. People who previously had to wait for engineering time can now create something concrete. That changes the conversation. Instead of describing an abstract idea, you can show a flow. Instead of writing a long product spec, you can prototype the interaction. Instead of asking “would this work?”, you can test a rough version. That is powerful. But there is a trap. A prototype can look much mor

I recently launched SpotClause, a small AI contract review and reader tool. The idea came from a simple problem: contracts are often difficult to read, especially for freelancers, consultants, and small teams who receive agreements but do not work with contract language every day. SpotClause helps users: summarize contracts in plain language identify key clauses understand payment terms, renewal terms, cancellation language, obligations, and deadlines compare two contract versions and see added, removed, changed, and unchanged wording I also added a Contract Clause Library with plain-language explanations of common clauses like cancellation clauses, renewal clauses, payment terms, confidentiality clauses, and notice periods. You can try the AI Contract Review Tool here: AI Contract Review Tool You can explore the Contract Clause Library here: Contract Clause Library SpotClause is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. The goal is to help people understand contract language more clearly. I would appreciate feedback on: whether the homepage explains the product clearly whether the AI contract review page feels understandable what clause explanations would be useful to add next

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How to make LLMs deterministic, in plain English. The version I share with founders and product teams before they make decisions worth real money. You use AI tools every day. But can you explain what happens when you hit send? Most people cannot. And that gap is costing them. Bad prompts. Broken products. Decisions made on the wrong assumptions. The Hard Truth Every LLM explainer out there is written for researchers or so basic it tells you nothing useful. Neither helps you build better products or work with AI more effectively. This is the version I share with senior leaders, founders, and product teams before they make decisions worth real money. 1. It Is Not a Search Engine. It Is Not a Database. It Is a Prediction Machine. When you type a prompt and hit send, the LLM is not finding an answer from somewhere. It is predicting the most likely words to follow your input. Based on patterns it learned from billions of documents. That is the whole process. Wrong: "The AI knows the answer." Right: "The AI predicts the most likely answer based on what it has seen." This changes everything about how you use it. When an AI gives you a wrong answer confidently, it is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do. Predict. Not verify. 2. The Autocomplete Comparison (And Why It Only Gets You Halfway) You have probably heard the phrase "autocomplete on steroids." It is not wrong. But it misses something important. Your phone autocomplete learned from your messages. An LLM learned from most of the written internet. Books. Research papers. Code. Billions of examples. At that scale, the patterns start to look a lot like real thinking. Not because the model understands in the way you do. Because it has seen so much that it can predict what a good answer looks like. When I was building AstroNayak I fed Vedic astrology principles into the system prompt. The LLM produced interpretations that genuinely surprised me. It did not know Vedic astrology. It had seen enough of it t

Last year I needed to ask for a raise. I knew my number, I'd read the guides, I had bullet points in my notes app. Then my manager said "let's chat about your goals for next quarter" and I said "sounds great, looking forward to it" and hung up. Never brought up money. Same thing kept happening elsewhere. Coworker taking credit for my work, I said nothing. Relationship that should've ended months earlier, I kept postponing. I always knew what to say. I just couldn't say it with someone actually looking at me. So I started building a thing to practice on. That thing became cosskill . What it actually is You pick a persona, tell it the situation in a sentence, and start talking. The persona doesn't help you. It holds position and pushes back. You practice not folding. Think of it as a flight simulator for hard conversations. You rehearse until your opener comes out steady, then go do the real thing. 20 personas across five categories: Operators (Musk, Jobs): first-principles thinking, harsh product feedback Strategists (Trump, Buffett): treat everything as a deal or a bet Relationship (Ex, Coworker): breakups, workplace friction, family money Philosophy (Socrates, Aurelius, Confucius, Sun Tzu, four more): each tradition frames problems differently Psychology (Rogers, Rosenberg, Ellis, Frankl, Kahneman, Jung): therapeutic frameworks on real situations These aren't celebrity impressions. The Buffett persona won't hype your startup idea. It'll ask "what's the downside?" and keep asking until you have something concrete. Tech stack Next.js 16 on Cloudflare Workers. DeepSeek for inference. Cloudflare D1 (SQLite at edge) for the bits that need to persist. No user accounts, chat history lives in localStorage. Monthly cost stays low enough that the free tier (10 messages/day) doesn't worry me. Why I made these choices DeepSeek instead of GPT-4/Claude. Each conversation is 10-30 messages. At GPT-4 pricing a free product bleeds money. DeepSeek gives maybe 90% of the quality for

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System-prompt caching alone cut repeat-call costs by half Tool definitions cache separately, perfect for agent loops Conversation history caching pays off after turn three 1-hour TTL beats the default 5 minutes for batch jobs My Anthropic API bill dropped 70 percent last month and I did not change a single model. I changed where the cache breakpoints went. Here are the five patterns I now use on every Claude integration I ship. Pattern 1: Cache The System Prompt First The system prompt is the cheapest win and most people skip it. My agents run with a 4,000 token system prompt that explains the role, the output format, the safety rules, and a few examples. That prompt never changes inside a session. Before caching, I paid full input price for those 4,000 tokens on every single call. With an agent that loops 30 times to finish a task, that is 120,000 tokens of pure repetition. The fix is one parameter. I add a cache_control block with type: "ephemeral" to the last content item in the system prompt array. The first call writes the cache and costs slightly more (cache writes carry a small premium). Every call after that reads the cache at roughly one tenth the input price. Here is the rule I follow: the cached block has to be at least 1,024 tokens for Claude Sonnet, or it gets ignored silently. My 4,000 token prompt clears that easily. If your system prompt is short, this pattern does nothing, so do not bother adding the breakpoint to a 200 token instruction. The order matters more than people expect. The cache works as a prefix. Everything before the breakpoint gets stored. Everything after it is read fresh. So I put the stable stuff (role, rules, examples) up top and the volatile stuff (user query, current date) down below the breakpoint. Reorder this wrong and your cache hit rate collapses because the prefix changes on every call. One real number from my logs: a document-classification job that runs 2,000 times a day. The system prompt is 3,800 tokens. Caching it sav

Claude Code — My daily dev tool Claude Code by Anthropic is the one I use the most for development, by far. What sets it apart from the others: it integrates directly into the terminal and editor, it can read and modify files, navigate an entire codebase, and understand the global context of the project. Not just responding to a copy-pasted snippet in a chat window. In practice, when I have an idea, I ask it to structure the project and challenge my choices. And to be clear: I challenge it too. 😄 I sometimes disagree with its suggestions, and that's often where the conversation becomes interesting. It's a tool, not an oracle. Perplexity — My reference for research Perplexity is my main tool when I need a reliable and verifiable answer. It's a response engine that systematically cites its sources — you ask a question, it answers with excerpts from real web pages and direct links. No more hallucinations without references. However, I use it almost exclusively on desktop. On smartphone, it's flooded with messages pushing the paid version. Understandable from their side, but frankly annoying when you just want to do a quick search. 🙄 Gemini — For those in the Google ecosystem Gemini is Google's AI, and its main advantage is integration with Gmail, Docs, Drive, Sheets, and Google Search. I have a Google Pixel, and on that side, it does integrate very well with its own ecosystem. It's practical for analyzing documents or getting a quick summary without leaving the interface. That said, in terms of responses, it sometimes falters. 😬 Not systematically, but regularly enough that I stay on guard. And if privacy is a priority for you, it's worth thinking twice before entrusting it with your documents — I talk about this in my article on securing yourself on the Internet . ChatGPT — The natural entry point ChatGPT by OpenAI is the most known and most versatile AI. Writing, code, analysis, translation, summary, creativity... it does a bit of everything, often very well. The fre

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How a Product Sync Automation Project Transformed Customer Onboarding When people think about impactful engineering work, they often imagine distributed systems, high-scale infrastructure, or complex algorithms. One of the most impactful projects I worked on wasn't any of those. It was solving a seemingly simple problem: Keeping product data in sync across multiple retail systems. Years later, our CEO still remembers how much smoother customer onboarding became after this project. The Context: What is Commerce Connect? At Casa Retail AI, we have an internal platform called Commerce Connect (CC) . Commerce Connect acts as the central Product Information Management (PIM) system and serves as the source of truth for product information. Under the hood, it is built on top of a customized version of the open-source e-commerce platform Spree Commerce , extended with multi-vendor and multi-tenant capabilities. Its primary responsibility is simple: Collect product information from multiple retail ecosystems and distribute it to every Casa product that needs it. Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is synchronized to multiple downstream systems. Why Product Data Matters Many applications inside Casa depend on product information. Product Consumers Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is distributed to multiple systems across the Casa ecosystem. Customer-Facing Applications Several products rely on product information to provide context and improve customer experience: Lead management applications use product information during customer interactions. Ticket management systems link customer issues to specific products. Digital receipts display product names, images, and related details. Analytics & Reporting Product data powers business dashboards and reports, helping retailers answer questions such as: Which categories perform best? Which products attract the most attention? Which products generate the most complaints? It is also used for filtering and segme

The plan was simple Take the specs we'd written, turn them into Jira epics, stories and subtasks, and start sprinting. It took longer than expected. Here's what actually happened — and what I learned. Why automate Jira setup at all? HandyFEM has 8 epics, 37 stories and ~160 subtasks. Creating that manually would take a full day and be error-prone. More importantly: the specs were already written in a structured format. Translating structured data into Jira issues is exactly the kind of repetitive task that should be automated. So I wrote a Node.js script to do it via the Jira REST API. Problem 1 — Jira Spaces ≠ Jira Classic My account uses Jira Spaces — Atlassian's newer interface. The classic Jira has CSV import built in. Jira Spaces doesn't. This isn't documented anywhere obviously. You discover it by looking for the import option and not finding it. Lesson: always check which version of Jira you have before planning your workflow. The API still works, but some endpoints behave differently. Problem 2 — The API token wasn't the issue (until it was) First attempt: connection error. I assumed it was the token. It wasn't — it was an expired token from a previous session. Regenerating it fixed the connection. The real lesson: curl -u email:token https://your-domain.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/myself is the fastest way to verify auth before running any script. Problem 3 — customfield_10014 doesn't exist in team-managed projects In classic Jira, linking a story to an epic uses a field called customfield_10014 (Epic Link). In team-managed projects (Jira Spaces), this field doesn't exist. You use parent instead. The error was clear once I saw it: "customfield_10014" : "Field cannot be set. It is not on the appropriate screen, or unknown." Fix: remove customfield_10014 , keep only parent: { id: epicId } . Problem 4 — Board search doesn't work for team-managed projects The Agile API endpoint /rest/agile/1.0/board?projectKeyOrId=HFM returns empty for team-managed projects, even

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