15 articles exploring developer tools
Skills, subagents, and MCP servers aren't tiers of the same capability - they solve three different context-cost problems. A primary-sourced decision framework.
AI solved the generation problem and created the comprehension problem. The bottleneck is no longer output volume. It is review surface area.
Markdown is a storage format. MDX is an execution format. Every AI coding tool chose .md for agent instructions. The distinction explains why, and when MDX earns its place.
74% of AI coding tool users report meaningful productivity gains. Most designers are not in that number. The blocker is not skills or fear. It is project structure. A complete designer-ready Claude Code repo with DESIGN.md, design tokens, skills, agents, and a weekend setup guide.
Expert persona prompting reduces factual accuracy by 3.6 points. Here are the four patterns that actually work - with a decision table and real session data.
Most tools marketed as knowledge graphs for AI coding are dependency graphs. I built three production KGs, ran the experiments on LangChain, and the results were not what the vendors claimed.
Smaller, constrained AI models force clarity and structure. I build faster with Haiku than Opus because constraints eliminate bad habits. Here's why.
A journey building issue-search-skill: capturing errors once, retrieving solutions forever. Local-first knowledge management that resolves recurring issues 12x faster.
Most AI coding tool comparisons still reward the wrong things. A workflow-first breakdown of Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, and Antigravity through the lens that actually matters: how teams ship under real constraints.
Why one-off prompting does not compound, and how to move from isolated prompts to repeatable AI workflows using playbooks, MCP data sources, and action layers.
A battle-tested blueprint for Claude Code projects that stay predictable at 50+ files - folder layout, .claudeignore, skills architecture, and 3 ready-to-copy templates.
The MCP servers that matter most for real AI leverage: analytics, email, calendar, GitHub, databases, observability, SEO, social, docs, and file storage. Plus practical playbooks for turning them into repeatable workflows.
A CTO's honest account of building a personal portfolio site from scratch - the decisions that made sense at the time, the bugs that didn't, and what I'd do differently.
Battle-tested techniques for .claudeignore, context compression, and multi-agent task splitting that cut token usage by 60–90% without losing Sonnet's predictive accuracy.
From a simple JSON formatter to a 400+ tool developer platform serving 100K+ users - the complete engineering journey covering architecture, zero-backend design, performance, and deployment.