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Every developer has a "starter project." Some keep a GitHub template. Some duplicate their previous SaaS project. Some run create-next-app and spend the next two hours installing the same dependencies, configuring the same tools, and recreating the same folder structure. I was in the second group. Every new project started the same way. bun create next-app Then came the checklist. Install Tailwind CSS. Configure Biome. Add shadcn/ui. Organize folders. Set up a UI library. Configure TypeScript. Add environment files. Set up a monorepo. Copy utility functions. Configure path aliases. Install development tools. None of these tasks were difficult. They were just repetitive. After starting enough projects, I realized something: I wasn't building products. I was rebuilding the same foundation over and over again. The Starter Kit Trap Like many developers, I created a "starter repository." Whenever I wanted to build something new, I'd clone it. It worked... until it didn't. Eventually I had multiple starter repositories. One for a monorepo. One for a standalone project. One with authentication. One without authentication. One for experiments. One that was already outdated. Keeping them synchronized became its own maintenance project. Fix a bug in one. Forget to fix it in another. Upgrade Next.js in one repository. Forget the rest. The more starters I created, the less useful they became. Why Existing Starters Didn't Quite Fit There are already fantastic starter kits in the ecosystem. Some focus on minimalism. Others include every feature imaginable. The problem wasn't that they were bad. The problem was that they optimized for someone else's workflow. Every project I build starts with almost the same stack. Next.js TypeScript Bun/pnpm Tailwind CSS v4 shadcn/ui Biome Production-ready project structure I didn't want to answer twenty configuration questions every time I scaffolded a project. I wanted one command. npx create-notils my-app …and be ready to start building. Opini

Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new version of its Kimi model this week, prompting concern about "full AI communism."

CSS has been around for about 30 years. It is the only styling language built specifically for the web platform, and it is one of the three core technologies that make the web what it is. Without it, every page would be a block of black text on a white background, laid out from top to bottom with no control whatsoever. That is not an exaggeration. That is what the web looks like without CSS. The original design goal of CSS has never changed. It is a declarative language that describes how documents should be presented. It does one thing and it does it in a standardized way that works across browsers. That restraint is not a weakness. It is the reason CSS has survived for two decades without being replaced. It never tried to be more than a styling language. Looking back at frontend development in the late 2000s, the frustration is hard to overstate. The gap between what CSS could do and what designs required was so wide that the platform itself felt like the obstacle. The vendor prefix era is the clearest example. You wrote -webkit- , -moz- , -ms- , -o- before every experimental property, often all four, because no browser could agree on when a feature was stable. Autoprefixer became a standard dependency not because developers were lazy, but because manual prefix management was genuinely unsustainable. It was not that CSS was badly designed. It was that the pace of the platform could not keep up with what developers were building. This created a pattern. Every time the platform fell short, the community built a workaround. Those workarounds became tools. Those tools became dependencies. And those dependencies reshaped how we thought about CSS entirely. Each new abstraction solved a real problem, but it also moved us further from writing actual CSS. Eventually, it became natural to assume that any serious project needed a layer on top of CSS to be viable. However, if CSS is so good at its job, why have we spent so long building alternative ecosystems on top of it? Pr

I just tagged 1.0.0 of ts-treegen, a small TypeScript library for describing file structures as data and writing them to disk. If you've ever built a CLI, a scaffolding tool, or anything that needs to generate a bunch of files and folders, you know the usual approach: a pile of fs.writeFileSync calls, manual path joins, and conditional logic scattered everywhere. ts-treegen is my attempt at making that feel less like plumbing and more like just describing what you want. What it looks like import { file , dir , emit , plan } from " ts-treegen/node " ; const files = await emit ( file ( " README.md " , " # My New App " ), dir ( " src " , file ( " index.ts " , " console.log('hello'); " )), ); const p = await plan ( files , { targetDir : " ./output " }); await p . run (); file() and dir() build a tree. emit() resolves it. plan() figures out what needs to be written and gives you a chance to inspect it before anything touches disk. That's the whole API. Conditional files don't need any special syntax either. It's just JavaScript: isProd && file ( " .env.production " , " NODE_ENV=production " ); No template tags, no wrapper nodes to learn. If a value is falsy, it's filtered out. Why I built it this way The goal from the start was to keep the surface area small enough that you could hold the whole API in your head after reading the README once. I went through a few iterations before landing here, and each one was mostly about removing things rather than adding them. Conflict resolution collapsed down to a single overwrite flag. Copy helpers got cut because fs.cp already does the job. Custom error types got replaced with things you'd actually reach for in normal code. Every feature I kept had to earn its place by solving something real, not just being possible to build. Along the way the library also became runtime-agnostic. The core has zero dependencies and works against a small FileSystem interface, so I/O is fully pluggable. ts-treegen/node wires up Node's fs/promises fo

In this blog post, we will see why almost every major AI subscription, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, somehow landed on the exact same $20 a month price tag. We will trace it back to where it started, look at the actual reasoning behind the number, and figure out whether this price ceiling will hold or eventually crack the way streaming subscriptions did. The $20 monthly price point shared by ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro, and Google AI Pro traces back to OpenAI's February 2023 launch, which was designed to subsidize free-tier costs rather than reflect the actual value of the product. Competitors adopted the number through price anchoring, not independent cost analysis. The same pattern has extended to smaller AI tools and is now repeating at higher tiers, with $200 and $100 monthly plans emerging for power users. Despite identical pricing, what each $20 subscription delivers varies significantly across providers in terms of usage limits, features, and model access. The Coincidence That Isn't a Coincidence As of mid-2026, ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Perplexity Pro all cost exactly $20 a month. Google AI Pro (formerly Gemini Advanced) sits one cent below at $19.99. Four completely different companies, four completely different models, and yet the sticker price converges on almost the same number. That's not four companies independently landing on the same cost math. It's one company setting a price, and everyone else deciding not to compete on it. Where It Actually Started: OpenAI, February 2023 ChatGPT launched free in November 2022 and crossed a million users within about a month, which was an enormous number for a research preview. On February 1, 2023, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, expanding it internationally on February 10. The pitch at the time was simple: general access even during peak load, faster responses, and priority access to new features. Worth remembering: this was the GPT-3.5 era. GPT-4 hadn't shipped yet. Subs

Mystic Leaks suggests that the Pixel 11a will return to featuring a flagship-grade processor with the Tensor G6. Rather than the Tensor G5 found in the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro, the Pixel 10a shipped with the previous generation Tensor G4. That was a huge disappointment since, typically, the Pixel a lineup kept the modern […]

This started as a comment @wrencalloway left on my last post. It was sharp enough that it deserved more than a reply — so here's the full version. You did the work. The page is server-rendered. The JSON-LD is in the raw response. curl returns the whole article, headline and all. A crawler that fetches your URL gets everything it needs. Except the crawler never fetches your URL. It asks the CDN, and the CDN says 403. Your content is perfect and unreachable. This is the layer underneath the one everyone talks about — and it's invisible in every tool you'd normally reach for. Two different kinds of "no" robots.txt is a note taped to the door. It says "please don't come in." A polite crawler reads it and turns around. A rude one ignores it and walks straight past. Either way, the note never touches your bytes — it's a request, enforced entirely by the visitor's own manners. A WAF or CDN rule is the door. It answers the request itself, at the edge, before anything reaches your origin: 403 Forbidden , 429 Too Many Requests , or a JavaScript challenge the bot can't solve. The HTML behind that door could be a masterpiece or a blank page. The bot sees neither. It sees the status code. People spend weeks perfecting the note and never check whether the door is locked. This isn't hypothetical — here's the data Cloudflare Radar publishes what actually happens to AI-crawler traffic across its network. From the AI Insights dashboard (7-day view, as of 18 July 2026): Of all HTTP responses served to AI bots and crawlers: 200 OK — 73.6% 403 Forbidden — 5.2% 429 Too Many Requests — 1.3% 503 — 1.1% AI-crawler response codes. Source: Cloudflare Radar, AI Insights, 7-day view, 18 Jul 2026. Read that again. More than one in fifteen requests from AI crawlers is being actively refused at the edge — 403 or 429 — before it ever touches the content. Not deprioritised. Refused. And most of that isn't a decision. It's a default — a managed WAF ruleset, a "block AI bots" toggle flipped in 2024, a

Every patient in the public tour of my care platform is a computer science pioneer. Ada Lovelace has a pain score. Alan Turing is due for a check-in. And every one of them has a patient ID no real system could ever issue, an ID that is wrong the way a date in month thirteen is wrong. None of this is an accident. It is the most useful compliance idea I have had this year. A good fake is a liability Here is the problem with realistic demo data. Under HIPAA, nobody can tell a well-made fake from the real thing by looking. A screenshot of a fake patient named John Smith with a plausible ID looks exactly like a screenshot of a real one. So when that image turns up in a deck, or a tweet, or a forwarded email, someone has to prove it is clean. And the only way to prove it is to go back to the database and show the record does not exist. That is an audit. Every plausible fake carries a future audit inside it. So a good fake does not reduce your risk. It just moves it. The better the fake looks, the more it costs to prove it is one. The safety of a fake is not in how real it looks. It is in how obviously fake it is. A plausible fake needs an audit to clear it. An impossible fake clears itself. The fix is to stop making fakes plausible and start making them impossible. A patient named Grace Hopper with an ID that breaks the format on sight cannot be a real record. Anyone can check that from the pixels alone. No lookup, no audit trail, no meeting. Zero pixels The public showcase at clearpathcare.ai contains zero pixels from the production console. Every screen is a React recreation, rebuilt by hand to look like the product without ever touching it. What broke: An early draft of the marketing screens started as console screenshots with seeded test patients: realistic names, realistic IDs. Then I asked one question the images could not answer: prove there is no real record in this frame. I could not. So I deleted every screenshot and rebuilt the screens from scratch. The rebuilt

Every few weeks I hit the same wall: I have a 300 MB screen recording, and something on the other end wants it under 8 MB . Discord, an email attachment, a bug tracker, a form that silently rejects anything bigger. The usual advice is "just use HandBrake" or "run ffmpeg with a lower CRF." But CRF doesn't take a target size — it takes a quality knob . So you export, check the size, it's 11 MB, nudge the knob, export again, now it's 5 MB and looks like a potato, nudge back… It's a binary search you run by hand, one full encode per guess. The thing is, hitting an exact size isn't a guessing game at all. It's arithmetic you can do before you encode. I ended up wrapping that arithmetic into a little Rust CLI ( DeepShrink ), but the math is the interesting part, and almost nobody writes it down. So here it is. The one insight everything rests on File size is (roughly) bitrate × duration . A bitrate is bits per second. A duration is seconds. Multiply them and the seconds cancel, leaving bits — the size of the file. That's it. That's the whole trick. Normally you treat bitrate as the input and size as whatever falls out. Flip it around: fix the size, measure the duration, and solve for the bitrate. You know the duration (ffprobe will tell you), and you know the size you want (the platform's limit). The only unknown is the bitrate — and now it's a single division away. bitrate = size_in_bits / duration_in_seconds Everything below is just this equation with the real-world messiness added back in. Building the budget, step by step Say I want a 60-second clip to fit Discord's 8 MB limit. 1. Turn the target size into bits. Sizes are in bytes, bitrate is in bits, so multiply by 8. (I'll use 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes here to keep the mental math clean; if your platform means mebibytes, same method, different constant.) target_bits = 8_000_000 bytes × 8 = 64_000_000 bits (64 Mbit) 2. Reserve a little for container overhead. An .mp4 isn't pure video and audio — there's a container, a m

I remember when coding interviews happened at a whiteboard, no computer, no internet, just a marker and whatever you could hold in your head. When AI tools arrived, using one in an interview was the red flag. Now the red flag is the candidate who doesn't use AI enough. In about two years, the same tool went from forbidden to expected. And it only gets faster. Every few months another wave rolls in, a model out of some lab, a tool that does something it couldn't last year, and it resets what counts as normal. You ride it, or you let it break over you. Plenty of people imagine a third option, waiting on the beach with their arms crossed until the water goes calm, but the water never goes calm, and it was never going to wait for them. all in I've decided to ride it, in the most literal way I have. All of my code is written by AI now (is it mine at this point?), and somewhere along the way I stopped treating that as a threat to be managed and started treating it as leverage to be spent. I know the engineers who went the other way, who made a personality out of dismissing the tools, and the tools got better anyway while they just fell further behind. Going all in wasn't one decision; it's one I make again every few weeks. A better model ships, and I rebuild a working agent on top of it instead of staying on the old version, because the result comes out better and cheaper. Relying on older models would have been easier, and most people do. Riding means doing that over and over, long after the novelty wears off. I get why people stop trying to keep up. The volume is genuinely insane, more launches in a week than you could try in a month, and it isn't only engineers feeling it now, it's anyone whose work runs on a keyboard. People are overwhelmed and often giving up. But you don't have to keep up with everything; you just can't ignore it all. keep the thinking It means handing a lot of work to AI, and I hand over more every month. It writes code, drafts the first version of

Capture the ringleader first. The rest will scatter on their own. — The 36 Stratagems, Capture the...