A developer blog
Table of Contents GitHub Introduces Stacked Pull Requests GitHub has put stacked pull requests into public preview , but what are stacked PRs exactly? A stack is an ordered set of pull requests where each layer targets the one below it, so a large change can be split into small, focused pieces without manually maintaining a pile of dependent branches. You can create and manage stacks from…
Table of Contents Every coding agent I use has a setting for this now. Claude Code has /effort , Codex has model_reasoning_effort , and OpenCode has /variants . In opencode I cycle through variants with a keybind. Low, medium, high, and then something at the top like xhigh or max . And for the longest time I had no idea what it was doing when I turned that up. My assumption was that I'm giving the…
Table of Contents "LLMs are sponges that soak up everything you do and repeat it back to you." - Scott Robinson TypeScript 7 Is Here, and It's Fast TypeScript 7 is a native port of the compiler , rewritten in Go, and it lands somewhere between 8x and 12x faster on full builds. The team's own table has the VS Code codebase dropping from 125.7s to 10.6s, and bumping the new --checkers 8 flag pushes…
Table of Contents Almost every conversation about AI tools starts and ends with the same question, "which model is the best"? We argue about benchmark scores, we watch the leaderboards, and we switch tools the moment a new frontier model drops. Here's the thing though, the model tells you only one part of the story. The other part is something called the harness , and lately that's the half the…
Table of Contents Fable 5 Returns Fable 5 is back , and the terms of its return tell you more than the announcement does. For a limited window you can spend up to 50% of your weekly plan limit on it, and once that's gone you burn usage credits. The model that was supposedly too dangerous to release has come back as a promotional slot with a usage cap. In the last issue I wrote about how Fable 5's…
Table of Contents GPT-5.6 "Sol" Ships, and the US Government Decides Who Gets It OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol , which it's calling a next-generation model, and the US government will decide who gets to use it . The rollout is being staggered at the request of the Trump administration, with access vetted rather than open to all. The naming drew groans first, since calling something a…
Table of Contents Lore: An Open Source Version Control System Built for Scale Lore is a new open-source version control system designed for scalability. The idea is simple, handle the things Git handles badly, namely large binary assets and giant monorepos that make git status crawl. Anyone who has wrangled Git LFS knows the pain, since Git was built for text and the model starts creaking the…
Table of Contents SpaceX Acquires Cursor for $60 Billion SpaceX is buying Anysphere (the company behind Cursor), for $60 billion in stock, and it happened days after SpaceX's blockbuster IPO. Cursor, an AI-powered code editor built on top of VS Code (a VS Code fork), is being valued higher than most of the companies whose code it helps write. SpaceX reportedly plans to use Cursor across its…
Table of Contents Claude Opus 4.8 anthropic.com Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 this week, and while the version bump is incremental, the changes aren't. Opus 4.8 ( claude-opus-4-8 ) flags uncertainties more readily, asks questions before making changes, and catches its own mistakes, the kind of behavior that separates a useful coding assistant from a confident sounding autocomplete. The pricing stays…
Table of Contents The Weekly Diff by Syntackle is a new series, a curated roundup of the most interesting developer-relevant stories from the past week. No fluff, just the stuff worth your time. GitHub Confirms Breach of 3,800 Repos via Malicious VSCode Extension A trojanized version of the Nx Console VS Code extension, tied to the broader TanStack npm supply-chain attack, compromised a GitHub…
Table of Contents There is no shortage of AI coding tools right now, but the ones that get the most attention are almost always proprietary such as Claude Code , Codex, and Cursor. They are well-marketed and easy to get started with. But they also come with tradeoffs such as not owning the workflow, you cannot swap providers freely, and you are locked into one vendor's pricing. Open source AI…
Anthropic recently announced that "1 Million token context window" is now generally available to all users for Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models. It's amazing that in a couple of years, we went from GPT-3 with a 4K token context window (feels ancient), to Google becoming the first AI company to introduce a 1M token context window AI model, and Meta taking it as far as introducing a 10M token…
Table of Contents Opencode is an open source AI coding agent similar to Claude Code , Gemini CLI, and Codex. It's an interactive terminal user interface (TUI) which connects with most of the AI model (LLM) providers out there, OpenRouter, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI , Amazon Bedrock, Groq, Ollama, you name it. Out of the box, Opencode allows you to connect Google as a provider via an API key . But,…
Table of Contents AI development tools are evolving fast, but sometimes access to the most powerful models is gated behind expensive APIs or restricted platforms. That’s exactly what antigravity-claude-proxy , an open-source project by Badri Narayanan S , enables. It masterfully links Google’s Antigravity with Anthropic’s Claude Code, letting you run Claude models powered by your Antigravity…
Table of Contents React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) is a highly critical vulnerability reported by Lachlan Davidson on November 29th, 2025. React2Shell has a CVSS score of 10.0 (most critical on the scale of 0-10), and is a pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in which the vulnerable RSC (React Server Components) code unsafely deserializes payloads from HTTP requests to Server…
Google casually dropped three products — upgraded versions of two of their most popular products, Gemini and Nano Banana, and Antigravity — an IDE with agentic capabilities (a VSCode fork using Windsurf tech since Windsurf founders signed a $2.4 billion deal with Google and joined Google Deepmind along with some other Windsurf employees). Gemini 3 Pro According to benchmarks and Google , Gemini 3…
AWS and Azure, two of the largest cloud providers having a market share of ~30% and ~23% respectively (as of 2025), experienced large scale outages recently. These outages affected multiple interdependent services. In this post, I will explore what are the implications of these outages, what can be done about them, and how fragile the web really is. Table of Contents AWS Outage - October 19, 2025…
With the release of version 19.2, a new hook named useEffectEvent was introduced in React. As the name suggests, it is for the "events" defined inside useEffect . But what exactly is an "Event" and how does it affect the "Effect"? That's what I intend to discuss here in this post. useEffectEvent hook addresses a very particular problem where because of exhaustive-deps rule of useEffect,…
Recently, typescript started giving me an error Cannot find module or type declarations for side-effect import every time I load a CSS file or a font file in the entry module of a framework such as Astro(Vite)/Nextjs. The interesting part is, I didn't even change the typescript version of my project. It seemed like it was using some other version of typescript . Then, I looked at the VS Code 's…
Ever noticed the "bounce" scroll effect after reaching the end of a page showing a white background especially for SPAs (Single Page Application)? That's the background color of the body (if white or not defined) appearing when the SPA root (mounted) element slides down. I find it particularly annoying as it breaks the flow, look and feel of the website or application. Now you might say why not…
With the introduction of the new Responses API (which is an upgraded version of the Chat Completions API), OpenAI plans to sunset the Assistants API with effect from 26th August, 2026. The Chat Completions API will still be supported, but OpenAI recommends to use the new Responses API for all upcoming projects. Originally, the Assistants API was created for sophisticated tool calling and execution…
Deciding which tools to use while building a React web application is subjective, but in this post, I will propose a minimum set of tools needed to build a simple React application. This post will help you to build and get the React application up and running in just a few minutes. Table of Contents 1. Vite (For Bundling) Vite is now the go-to choice for most of the developers while building a…
The usage of AI, especially in the software industry, has increased a lot lately, but everything has a downside — and that, is, excess . Excess of anything is bad, and that includes the use of AI. "Vibe Coding" is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy (founder of Eureka Labs and an ex-founding member at OpenAI) in his tweet posted on Feb 3, 2025. He states, "There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe…
Table of Contents SQL Server is not natively supported on macOS and thus, there is only one option to use it on macOS, and that is via Docker. In this tutorial, I will setup and configure SQL Server database on macOS via Docker, demonstrate how to connect to the database, and also show how to backup and restore the DB. Setting up Docker If you haven't already, install Docker Desktop on your system…
Vite team introduced "Vite+" (a superset of Vite) in Amsterdam ViteConf on October 13, 2025. It is in its development phase right now, with a preview scheduled to be released in early 2026, but early access registrations are open. Vite is my go to build tool for building modern frontend applications and it integrates well with top frontend libraries such as React. On June 24, 2025, the team behind…
In this guide, I am sharing five of the best places to learn React . Doesn't matter if you are a newbie in React or advancing your journey as a React developer, these resources will help you at every step of your React journey. I wish I came across these resources while I was new to React. These React resources are completely free and you can always purchase a more in-depth, premium version of…
Table of Contents NOTE: Ice won't work on macOS 26 Tahoe (macOS 26 made significant changes in APIs), a stable release is in the works, but there are beta releases (0.11.13-dev.x) which you can try. I switched from Windows to macOS recently, and overall it has been a great experience so far, except for one thing — the menu bar icons. Some applications such as Docker , have menu bar icons that…
AI models and tools are becoming more and more capable day by day, especially at generating code. With tools like Capacity , Firebase Studio , Lovable , v0 , Augment , one can create entire full stack applications by combining one or more of these tools. But, there's something off once you run the code generated by them. In this post, I will walk you through my experience of creating a full-stack…
MCP (Model Context Protocol) can be called as a buzzword of 2025, except it's not just that. It's a communication protocol launched by Anthropic — the company behind the family of Claude AI models. Almost all major AI companies including Google and OpenAI have embraced MCP and it's on its way to become a standardized way of communication for AI models. This post is about me exploring what MCP is,…
Table of Contents With the "March 2025 (v1.99.0)" Visual Studio Code release, GitHub Copilot supports BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), meaning, I can now use my own custom API key and use any models associated with it in GitHub Copilot VSCode extension. Note that BYOK feature is not available to Copilot Business or Enterprise users yet. - code.visualstudio.com GitHub Copilot Chat supports API keys…
Microsoft (the company behind TypeScript) and its TypeScript team unveiled the biggest update yet, announcing a switch from JavaScript to Go on March 11th, 2025. This means TypeScript will receive up to 10x performance gain than its current implementation. This is a huge win for developers as it will drastically cut down editor start-up time for significantly large projects as well as improve…
Table of Contents I use the HTML transform method of the @11ty/eleventy-img plugin to post process any img or picture tags in my html. I find this method easy and universal. In this guide, I'll walk you through an approach of utilizing disk cache while using the HTML transform method of the eleventy image plugin. TLDR Tell the plugin to store the optimized images in the .cache folder which can be…
Table of Contents This week was bonkers in terms of tech announcements in the field of AI and quantum computing. Anthropic announced its latest and best Claude model yet — Claude 3.7 Sonnet on February 25, 2025. OpenAI jumped on the bandwagon and announced GPT 4.5 — its latest and largest model on February 27, 2025. To make things more interesting, Microsoft unveiled its first quantum chip —…
Table of Contents Deep research is one of the aspects AI companies are willing to implement and integrate with their current AI systems. The use cases of deep research are massive in nature — medical research, general knowledge, biography, finding something you don't remember but have enough context about it, statistical analysis — and it saves you a lot of time skimming through countless articles…
Table of Contents Create React App a.k.a CRA is a tool (setup tool I would say) which provides an opinionated architecture combining a set of tools required to configure, transpile JSX and bundle React. React team announced the deprecation of Create React App on February 14, 2025. Before it was official, CRA was already considered a "no-longer-to-be-used" tool to build modern React applications.…
Table of Contents DeepSeek's AI model "DeepSeek-R1" (a.k.a deepseek-reasoner) is the most talked about AI model at the time of this writing. I recently integrated it with better — a code reviewer github action powered by AI — which I developed during a hackathon. In this guide, I will walk you through ways in which you can integrate deepseek models in your tools and also talk about structured JSON…
React compiler was introduced to tackle massive re-rendering issues within a react application. What it does is that it looks at the code and figures out if a certain component or a value can be memoized or not to limit its re-rendering. Does that mean you should not use useCallback() , useMemo() or React.memo() from now? Not really. You should do manual memoization wherever you are certain that…
Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is an editor which is simple on it's own but enriched when combined with extensions. So, in this article, I will tell you some vscode extensions I personally use which might be beneficial to you. Table of Contents Download Visual Studio Code . 1. Cline # Cline is the best vscode extension for AI assistance. What I like about it the most is it's plan-then-act mode. While…
If you use a unix based operating system like macOS or Linux, you might have encountered this issue with switching node versions with nvm - where if you do nvm use <version> , the version is switched correctly in the current terminal shell, but if you try to use node on a new terminal shell or in a different terminal, you get a command node not found error. I recently experienced this issue…
Continuing my spree of app defaults , which I started in 2023 with this post , here's a slightly changed list of all the apps I use and will probably keep using for the rest of 2025: 🤖 AI Models/Chat Apps - Claude 3.5 Sonnet (for coding), ChatGPT (for general use), Perplexity (for search) 📨 Mail Client - Gmail 📝 Notes - Notion, Obsidian, Bear 📆 Calendar - Google Calendar 📁 Cloud - Google…
Table of Contents If someone were to ask me, what does a software engineer do on a basic level and what makes a good software engineer? I would say, problem solving. Yes, it’s the most basic and the most important skill to have as a software developer/engineer, yet most people don’t think about it before getting into software. But, it’s not that hard. In this post, I will list down three steps to…
Table of Contents Setting up a new Mac for development can be a daunting task, especially if you are new to MacOS or don't know where to start. In this guide, I'll tell you about some tools, apps and tips which are essential for a decent developer experience on a Mac. To keep it simple, I will break them down into categories such as terminals, editors, and other developer tools. But first, let me…
Code reviews have always been crucial in maintaining a standard and emphasizing on the best practices of code in a project. This is not a post about how developers should review the code, it's more about delegating a part of it to AI. As Michael Lynch mentions in his post - "How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human" - we should let computers take care of the boring parts of the code review. While…
Table of Contents Server Sent Events (SSE), as the name suggests, are a way to communicate with the client by keeping a persistent connection in which the server sends text messages to the client whenever they are available. They are similar to websockets but, unlike websockets, the connection is unidirectional, i.e. only the server has the capability to send messages and the client just listens.…
The this keyword in javascript is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts of javascript. There are already some brilliant resources out there to explain the this keyword, but in this article, you will see how the this reference is different in arrow functions introduced in ES6 as compared to regular function expressions. You will also get to know a way to visualize the this keyword…
Table of Contents Newsletters can be hard to follow along, especially when you subscribe to too many of them. That's why, today you will get to know about five newsletters every developer should follow and read. These are the newsletters I personally subscribe to. 1. Pointer Pointer.io is an engineering focused newsletter, an issue of which can be broken down into three sections: leadership…
I never got chrome's built-in AI model working on Chrome's Canary release (maybe because I am on v128), so I tried Chrome's Dev Channel - thanks @theo . Google Chrome has started shipping experimental AI features such as built-in AI in Chrome's Dev/Canary channels. In this tutorial, you will get to know how you can try the built-in AI model in chrome dev. RECOMMENDED Practice frontend system…
Hono, as per the docs, was originally built for Cloudflare Workers . It's an application framework designed to work the best for cloudflare pages and workers as well as javascript runtimes Deno and Bun. Although not built specifically for Node, an adapter can be used to run it in Node. In this tutorial, you will get to know how you can create a simple HTTP server in Node using Hono in less than 10…
Table of Contents Pagefind's take on search is quite simple - index your site at build time and host it alongside your static site. The search index sits right alongside the files of your site and it doesn't load all the data upfront. As mentioned in this HN answer , it only loads relevant search data when you start typing, and you can also load the js client (pagefind.js) conditionally when going…
Running PostgreSQL via Docker is one of the things you can do to quickly try postgresql without installing or configuring it locally. It's one of the benefits of using Docker . In this quick tutorial, you will get to know how you can run postgresql inside a docker container terminal using psql (a terminal interface to interact with postgresql databases). Pulling Official PostgreSQL Image Pull the…