Writing
Notes on building software
Honest takes on shipping products, indie hacking, and the realities of the tech industry. No fluff.
Claude Fable 5 Is Here: Mythos-Class Power for Everyone, and Whether It's Worth 2x the Price
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 yesterday, the first Mythos-class model cleared for general use. It posts 80.3% on SWE-Bench Pro, costs double Opus 4.8, and ships with a sibling, Mythos 5, that has the guardrails off. Here is what actually changed and whether you should switch.
Markr: Mark the Moment While You Record, Not After
I always wanted to do YouTube. I just hated the part where you rewatch a 30-minute recording twice to find your mistakes and pull clips out of it. Markr is a small open-source app that lets you drop timestamp markers while you record, so you stop rewatching everything later.
2,159 Cold Messages, 4 Replies: What Starting on Your Own Actually Looks Like
The romantic version of starting a startup skips the part where you send 2,159 cold messages and get 4 real replies. This is five weeks of the actual grind: the silence, the red flags, killing an idea I liked, and the absurd moment I built a product to help me look for a product.
Modern CSS in 2026: The JavaScript You Can Finally Delete
Tooltips, accordions, theme toggles, dropdown positioning, scroll animations, responsive components. For years we reached for JavaScript to do all of it. Modern CSS in 2026 does most of it natively, and the support numbers are finally good enough to ship. Here is the JavaScript you can delete and the CSS that replaces it.
Svelte 5 vs React in 2026: An Honest Comparison After Shipping Both
Svelte 5 introduced runes and turned the reactivity question into a real debate again. I built production apps with both Svelte 5 and React 19 this year. Here is the honest comparison: bundle size, the runes vs signals model, the TypeScript friction nobody mentions, hiring, and when each one is actually the right call.
Background AI Coding Agents in 2026: When to Delegate Work to Async Agents
The average coding agent session went from 4 minutes to 23 minutes in a year, and a lot of that work now happens without you watching. Background agents open a draft PR while you do something else. Here is how I decide what to hand off, what to keep local, and how to not drown in agent-generated pull requests.
The Best Background Coding Agents in 2026: Codex Cloud vs Cursor vs Copilot vs Claude Code
Every major coding tool now ships an agent that runs in the cloud and opens a pull request while you do something else. They look the same from the outside and behave very differently in practice. I ran real work through Codex cloud tasks, Cursor cloud agents, the Copilot coding agent, and Claude Code async to figure out which one to reach for and when.
How to Hire a Freelance App Developer Without Getting Burned (2026 Guide)
Most founders who get burned hiring a developer did not get unlucky. They skipped the questions that would have surfaced the problem before any money changed hands. Here is the practical guide to hiring a freelance app developer in 2026: the questions to ask, the red flags to walk away from, and how to protect your budget, your timeline, and your code.
How Much Does It Cost to Build an App in 2026? An Honest Breakdown
Quotes for the same app idea routinely range from $8,000 to $200,000, and most of that spread has nothing to do with the app itself. Here is an honest breakdown of what it actually costs to build an app in 2026, what drives the number up, and how to get a quote you can trust instead of a number someone pulled out of thin air.
Claude Opus 4.8 Is Here: Benchmarks, Dynamic Workflows, and Whether to Upgrade From 4.7
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 yesterday. It catches 4x more of its own code mistakes, runs hundreds of parallel subagents through Dynamic Workflows, and keeps the same price as 4.7. Here is what genuinely changed and whether it is worth switching.
How to Build Your First MCP Server in 2026: A Practical Developer Guide
Everyone is installing MCP servers. Almost nobody is writing them. The truth is that building a useful MCP server takes a single afternoon and pays back forever, because every model that speaks MCP (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf, every agent runtime) gets access to your tool the moment it ships. Here is the honest, opinionated walkthrough.
Writing Your Own Claude Code Skill in 2026: The Practical Guide
The Claude Code marketplace has thousands of skills. Almost none of them solve your exact problem, because nobody else has your exact workflow. The good news is that writing your own skill is the most underrated AI productivity unlock of the year, and it takes about thirty minutes once you understand the moving parts. Here is the walkthrough I wish existed.
A2A vs MCP in 2026: How AI Agents Actually Talk to Each Other
MCP crossed 97 million monthly SDK downloads. A2A is now governed by the Linux Foundation alongside it. Every major AI vendor backs both protocols, and most developers still cannot explain when to reach for which. This is the honest, hands-on guide.
I Got Falsely Reported and Banned on X. I Am Permanently Banned on Reddit. I Am Still Building SaaS.
Someone false-reported me on X and the account is gone. Reddit banned me permanently months ago. Two of the biggest distribution channels for indie hackers are now closed to me. Here is the honest version of what platform risk actually feels like, why mass-reporting is the new shadow ban, and why none of it is going to stop me from shipping.
Infrastructure as Vibe: What Comes After Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code told the machine exactly what to provision. Infrastructure as Vibe asks the machine to figure it out. After a decade of YAML and Terraform, developers are quietly tired of being the compiler between their intent and their cloud. Here is what the next layer actually looks like.
Claude Skills vs Cursor Rules vs Copilot Instructions: How Real Teams Set AI Coding Standards in 2026
Every AI coding tool now reads a config file. CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, copilot-instructions.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md. Most teams have three or four of them, written by different people, contradicting each other, drifting out of sync. Here is what each one actually does, where the meaningful differences are, and the layout that finally stopped my team from arguing about it on Mondays.
Prompts as Code: How to Version, Test, and Ship the Prompt Layer in 2026
Most production AI features are still glueing prompts together with string concatenation in some random Node service. The prompt is the new SQL query and we are all writing it like it is 2003. Here is what treating the prompt layer like real source code looks like in 2026, the workflow that actually catches regressions before users do, and the part that surprised me most when I made the switch.
The Claude Code Plugin Marketplace: How Skills, MCP Servers, and Plugins Actually Fit Together in 2026
In April 2026 Anthropic shipped a real plugin marketplace inside Claude Code. By May there were 2,800 skills, 400 plugins, and a community of developers swapping workflows the way we used to swap dotfiles. The marketplace is the most underrated developer tooling shift of the year, and most teams have no idea how to think about it. Here is the mental model, the install workflow, and the part that nobody is talking about yet.
The Freelance Profit Leak: Why Solo Developers Lose Money Even When They Are Booked Solid
Most freelance developers I know are busy. Most of them also have no idea which clients are actually profitable. The gap between "billable hours on the invoice" and "hours the project actually ate" is where six-figure freelance careers quietly turn into $25-an-hour grinds. Here is the profit leak nobody warns you about, the math you should be running every Friday, and the workflow that closed mine.
Vercel BotID In 2026: How The Invisible CAPTCHA Actually Works, And Where It Earns Its Place In My Stack
Vercel BotID went GA in mid-2025 and quietly replaced the visible CAPTCHA on a lot of indie SaaS sites in 2026. The promise is real: invisible bot detection that catches headless Playwright sessions without making your real users squint at fire hydrants. The price is real too. Here is what BotID actually does under the hood, the Basic versus Deep Analysis tradeoff, the route patterns I protect with it, and the day a single AI scraper convinced me to wire it in front of an endpoint I thought was already safe.
Featured Projects
Some of the products I've shipped: