From Nicholas C. Zakas’s regularly interesting newsletter: The best way to work with legacy code is to approach it patiently—understand small parts, write tests, and document what you learn. My favorite line about legacy code, which I’ve probably shared too much, is when David Khourshid called it “Legendary Code”. Legacy code feels a smidge mean […]
Some solid advice from a couple of Frontend Masters courses made for a fast, secure, and ready to scale deployment system.
The more effort you put in to what you put in, the higher quality you’re going to get out.
Senior engineers actually have a massive advantage with AI tools once they learn the basics. They know what questions to ask. They understand edge cases. A junior dev accepts the first output. A senior dev knows what’s missing.
Dan Abramov has an interesting article How to Fix Any Bug where he’s having Claude write the code, but a bug shows up he needs to fix. Claude just isn’t getting it and it keeps saying it’s fixed when it isn’t (classic). Claude was repeatedly wrong because it didn’t have a repro. Meaning Claude couldn’t see […]
I’m no expert here, but I understand an “MCP server” as a way to make an AI system a bit “smarter” by having more context and capabilities. I find AI coding agents pretty darn smart already particularly when they have your entire codebase and your instruction for context. But if you’re using it to build […]
Cursor has an “auto” mode, “but if you care about cost or predictability, it’s worth picking models manually.” says Steve Kinney.
Cursor is an AI-focused VS Code fork. Here’s Steve Kinney with a nice overview of what it offers and how to start getting help out of it right away.
Nicholas C. Zakas: I’m confident that going forward, software engineers will need to relearn how to create detailed tech specs for complex changes. It’s also likely that AI will help write and review these specs before implementing them. It’s time to embrace tech specs again because they can be a key to advancing your career. […]
A very interesting aspect of the AI smashing its way into every software product known to man, is how it’s integrated. What does it look like? What does it do? Are we allowed to control it? UX patterns are evolving around this. In coding tools, I’ve felt the bar being turned up on “anticipate what […]
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