DEV Community: Alex Hyett

Reducing my screen time with another device...

Alex Hyett — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In an attempt to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at my phone, I have bought myself another device. At least that is the lie I told myself for buying yet another gadget because it looked cool.

After seeing Max Glenister and Neil Brown speak so highly of this device I just had to buy the XTEINK X4 e-reader. Note, this is not sponsored in any way I just wanted to share it with you!

This is the 3rd e-reader that I own, so I definitely didn't need this device. I also have an old Kindle which I use exclusively for reading Kindle Unlimited books and a Kobo Clara Colour which is my main reading device.

This device though is different to the others. Its dimensions are 114 x 69 x 5.9mm which is just a little bit bigger than a credit card. It doesn't have a touchscreen but has physical buttons on the bottom and the side. There is also no backlight.

The device comes with a 32 GB SD card, some magnetic rings and a screen protector. The idea is that you stick the magnetic rings on the back of your phone case and then the device can stick to it. I have a MagSafe case anyway so the device sticks to that quite well.

This thing is really thin and light, you hardly even notice it sitting in your pocket.

Like all gadgets of this type, this thing came from China. I ordered it on 27th June and it arrived to me in the UK on the 9th July, which is not too bad.

Software #

I stayed with the stock firmware for around 15 minutes. Luckily it was in English so I didn't have to work out how to change the language but it is pretty basic.

There is bunch of different custom firmware for this device all forked from CrossPoint. I didn't bother looking around at the different firmware but I might do if I find an interesting one in future. I jumped straight to using ink. I installed it but using the web flash method and it was all done in a few minutes.

The device is really fast and the button layout is intuitive. The 2 buttons on the bottom are actually 4 buttons. On the side is the power button and another large button that is actually 2 buttons.

For turning the page you can either click the power button (you hold it down to turn it on/off) or use the side buttons or the bottom right buttons. I find myself clicking the power button the most as it sits nicely where my thumb or index finger sit.

This device is definitely fun to use and I have been using it more than looking at my phone which is a plus.

One feature I really liked with this firmware is the ability to add files via wifi. You can then navigate to the device using the IP address and add books and change the device settings. It also apparently connects to calibre but I have tried that yet.

Price #

In total the device with shipping cost me £51.90 ($70.10) which is not bad for an impulse purchase. For this price point I think this device is great. It is fun to keep in your pocket and do find myself reading more rather than just scrolling on my phone.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

🤖 AI #

AI Blog Questions Challenge - I think these questionnaires are really interesting to see how people are using AI. I plan on doing one of these soon as well.

Run a local coding model with pi and LM Studio - This is a good tutorial if you wanted to run some LLMs locally and do some coding.

CanIRun.ai — Can your machine run AI models? - This is great website to see what local models will run on your computer.

🛠️ Tools #

We are making Bunny DNS free - This is great. Hopefully this will be a good alternative to Cloudflare.

💻 Programming #

Enhancing with CSS Grid Lanes - CSS is getting masonry layouts. It is not supported fully yet but hopefully in a few years it will be across all browsers.

.gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git - I never knew there were so many way to ignore files in git. I can think of quite a few uses for a machine wide gitignore and didn't know this was an option.

🔒 Security #

A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer - With developers getting laid off this way and that scammers are naturally feasting on people's desperation. If you have to download any code as part of the interview process be extra vigilant.

LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach - If you are still using LastPass even after their last breach please find somewhere else and change all your passwords. I now have my passwords on a self hosted VaultWarden instance that is only accessible from my home network. It is working well for me.

🏢 Tech Industry #

Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors - Yay, lets hope the mass layoffs due to AI are coming to an end.

🎮 Gaming #

Half-Life 2 in a Browser - I know Half-Life 2 is quite old now but it still amazes me that it can run in the browser now.

📝 Blogging #

Blogging can just be stating the obvious - I have been trying to get back into blogging more but sometimes it is hard to come up with things to write about. This is a good reminder that you can write about anything, it's your blog.

🧠 Miscellaneous #

Your ePub Is fine - It is interesting that even though files can have valid CSS they still fail to load due to Adobe using a standard that is over a decade old. At least there is an alternative by renaming the file.

W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty - I really don't see many people signing up to W Social. Not when there are better social networks like Mastodon.

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words - Everyone knows about the red squiggles but never about the man that came up with the idea.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

🎬 Video - I Tried Building a Real App With AI. It Took a Year. - I talk about the process of creating HabitTed and the dangers of using AI to code for you. This video isn't public yet on YouTube so you get to view it slightly earlier.

📝 Article - Opting for privacy in webmentions - Last time I wrote about setting up webmentions on my website. I have now tweaked them a little to make them more privacy focused.

I Tried Building a Real App With AI. It Took a Year.

Alex Hyett — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores.

To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there are so many options. But we must have tried dozens of different apps but none of them quite fit what we were looking for.

Of course now we have AI, so this sort of thing should be easy to create. You just right a couple of prompts and AI will build it for you, while you sleep, or sip cocktails on the beach.

As we shall see it didn't quite turn out that way.

Requirements and Existing Apps #

So for this app I had a few requirements:

We wanted to have the habits in a long list and not have to go through multiple pages to find them.
We didn't want any data be stored in the cloud or on other peoples servers.
We wanted to be able to use the gen-emojis from iOS 18 for some of the icons. It is a great option when the predefined icons don't fit.
We needed to set goals on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
It should be possible to have no goal and just count the number of occurrences. My wife sometimes gets headaches so she wanted to keep track of all of those as well.
We wanted the ability to add notes. I wanted to be able to write down what exercises I did in each of my workouts and what speed I had got a song to when practicing guitar.
We wanted to set reminders on habits, either every day or on specific days of the week or month.

There is nothing in this list that is particularly groundbreaking so I had a look at the various options to see if something would work to save me having to develop something.

We first tried the Streaks app. This is a completely free app on iOS and even has an Apple Health integration.

This suited most of my needs but it couldn't do some of the requirements on this list:

The apps were in pages instead of a long list. When you have 20 things you want to track this can get pretty tedious flicking through all the pages. This app has won design awards so that is probably more of a me issue.
My wife couldn't find suitable icons for some of the things she wanted to do. Hence wanting the ability to create your own.
There was no way to count occurrences. You had to set how many times you wanted to do something every day. Which if you are tracking headaches isn't what you want as ideally you don't want any.
She also realised she needed a way of turning off streaks. Streaks aren't always helpful for everything that you are tracking.

We tried a few more apps as well. There is a popular one called HabitKit and another one called Grit. I quite liked the GitHub style contribution charts of HabitKit but my wife, not being a developer wasn't really fussed by this. Grit was probably the closet to what we were looking for but still lacked a few features.

To be honest I would have been quite happy with either HabitKit or Grit for my needs if it wasn't for one thing, the price.

Now I don't mind paying for applications. I have lots of apps on my phone that I have bought as well as desktop software I have paid for. I am all for supporting indie developers but I also remember a time when an iPhone app was the price of a coffee.

Grit on the other hand costs £9.99/month or £29.99/year. There is an option to buy a lifetime licence but it costs a whopping £44.99. That is nearly the cost of a new console game.

It is the same story with HabitKit as well but not quite as much at £1.99/month or £11.99/year with a £29.99 lifetime option.

Maybe I am just a stingy git but I don't want to add even more subscriptions to my budget I have enough as it is.

So I set out to build one myself with the help of AI.

I started this project in March last year. Cursor were giving away free credits and it was the perfect opportunity to see what AI was capable of. Up until this point I had mostly avoided using AI beyond simple chat questions. Given I had never developed anything in Swift before I needed all the help I can get.

We decided on the name HabitTed and my wife even designed a cute bear logo.

AI Development Process #

If you haven't developed an iOS app before you are pretty much limited to using XCode if you want to test your application on a simulator and debug it. So there was a lot of back and forth between cursor and Xcode to try and get everything set up.

This was just before Claude Code was released so this wasn't full agentic hands-off engineering. Instead, I broke down the development into lots of small tasks and went through them manually with the AI, testing each change as I went along.

I started with a simple hello world application. Then added in the habit list, the ability to add a habit, edit a habit and so on.

To be fair after about 6 hours over the course of a weekend, I had an app that appeared to work. It didn't do everything I wanted yet but you could create a habit with a custom icon, you could click on it to complete it, and it supported various goal options and even had iCloud syncing.

Even though I had something working and only took 6 hours, I can't say it was a pleasant 6 hours.

Usually when I complete a project, I am proud of what I have accomplished. Even if I had problems and things took longer than needed, I would finish it having learned something new.

Those failures taught me something and any frustrations I had during development were usually worth it by the end and at least I learned not to make the same mistake again.

However, after 6 hours I can't say I learnt much about Swift development.

Whenever there was an error I would find myself copy and pasting the error message and asking AI to try and fix things. I was getting annoyed with the AI for not being good enough to solve the issue, but also annoyed with myself that I couldn't do it either.

The Problems #

Even though I hadn't programmed in Swift before I have programmed in many other languages and looking at the code I could tell it wasn't good code.

Each of the views was nearly a 1000 lines long. The compiler on XCode couldn't handle the length and was always telling me to break things down. Styling for things like buttons that looked the same had completely different code in different views. The whole thing was a bit of mess.

So instead of relying on AI to try and fix the mess I decided to refactor it myself, manually, the old school way. I moved everything into separate views that were no more than 100 lines long and I fixed all the inconsistent code.

I then tested the app some more to make sure everything worked properly and found even more problems.

I found that the iCloud sync didn't actually work. It may have been syncing to iCloud but if you uninstalled the application and reinstalled it, it would just lose all your data.

I also found that once I had added a lot of completions to my habits, things started to become really slow. I realised the stats I had on the details page were looping through all the habits to calculate them every single time you went on the page.

I created some properties on the habits to store the stats instead, and moved the calculation to be done on habit completion, and then I realised the data model was overly complex and had some really weird naming. This led me to coming up with a data migration plan, otherwise habits would break whenever I changed the schema.

Once everything was fixed, I added in some of the missing features such as reminders and different goal options.

Then iOS 26 came out.

I am not sure if the used AI a lot for development in Apple, but iOS 26 had a lot of bugs.

I am really not a fan of the glass effect, so I turned on the reduce transparency accessibility option and this caused all sorts of problems in my app.

I use dark mode everywhere but opening a habit caused the title bar to turn white but with white text too so you couldn't read anything.

This is where AI really falls apart. iOS 26 had only just been released so AI couldn't help with any of the new changes. I even tried to convince it that iOS 26 was the latest version and it told me I must be mistaken.

In the end I managed to solve some of my problems from reading blog posts from other developers and ultimately Apple fixed the transparency bug in 26.1.

The Result #

So after many months of development, and even more months of testing I finally have an app that I am happy enough to put my name against and the code is something I am happy to carry on maintaining.

When it comes to releasing an app there is more than just the app itself, you have to put together a website and all the screenshots as well for the app listing. This always takes a lot longer than you anticipate.

It is available on the App Store if you want to give it a try, I will leave a link in the description. It is free to use for up to 6 habits, and if you did want to support me you can unlock everything for the price of a single coffee.

If it wasn't for AI, I probably wouldn't have started this app to begin with so for that I am thankful.

On the other hand, if I hadn't have used AI at all, I would have learnt a lot more and I wouldn't have needed to spend months cleaning up the codebase and fixing all the bugs.

After 6 hours, AI produced something usable but on deeper inspection it was a mess. AI coding can get you 80% there, but the last 20% will take you 80% of the time or even longer if you don't understand what it has written.

AI is more capable now than it was a year ago, but it is also more expensive and it doesn't solve the fact that by using it your aren't gaining any skills yourself. If your not able to do your job when Claude is down then you are relying far too much on AI.

I do wonder what this industry is going to be like in a few years time. No juniors are getting hired because companies are relying on senior developers with AI to do all the work.

Meanwhile, the senior developers are in 2 camps.

One half are using AI for absolutely everything but are slowly losing their ability to code. It is like a frog in boiling water that doesn't know it's dead until it is too late.

The other half are so sick of AI and are getting burnt out having to write prompts every day that they just don't want to do it anymore.

If the AI bubble does ever pop, I am not sure there is going to be enough competent developers left who are willing to pick up the pieces. Spending your time cleaning up AI slop that you didn't want to write in the first place doesn't sound like much fun.

Whichever side you're on, just make sure you don't sit in that hot water for too long.

Opting for privacy in webmentions

Alex Hyett — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:24:30 +0000

Last week I went full speed into setting up webmentions on my site. My implementation works around using webmention.io in my site's <head> and Bridgy for sending me webmentions for comments, likes and reposts on my posts that I share.

Ideally I would like to self-host my webmentions endpoint so I am not relying on another service but I haven't found a suitable replacement yet. Maybe I should just self-host webmentions.io as it is open source.

While looking for alternatives I came across this post The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger. He makes an excellent point when it comes to "silo backfeeds" which in this case is talking about sending webmentions from the Fediverse and Bluesky.

My webmention implementation involved showing names and avatars for all the people who liked, reposted or commented on my content including those from the Fediverse.

When someone likes or comments on a post on another platform, they aren't necessarily expecting for their name and profile picture to appear elsewhere. When someone interacts with a post it isn't them giving consent to have their name and image shown on my site.

Not all webmentions come from Brid.gy, others are sent directly to me from another website that also supports webmentions. This is where I believe you can say consent has been given.

This isn't me pulling information from elsewhere and sending it to my website. This is them choosing to send me a webmention to let me know they have mentioned me or commented on one of my posts.

I still however like to show when people have interacted with my site or continued the conversation on elsewhere.

So I have implemented a compromise.

For likes and reposts I now just show the count received no matter the source. Comments from the Fediverse are just shown as counts with a link back to my parent post.

Only when I receive a reply or a mention from another website that supports microformats, is it shown on my website.

I think this reaches the right balance between maintaining peoples privacy and still having that social aspect that makes the indie web so great.

Setting up Webmentions on my Static Site 💬

Alex Hyett — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I have been getting back into blogging recently. I know I write this newsletter every 2 weeks, but I try and keep to a set number of topics as I know my audience is mostly developers.

My blog gives me chance to write about whatever is on my mind, without worrying about it being relevant to my audience.

When I first started "surfing the web" it was all about personal websites and going from one person's blog to another via links and blogrolls. I miss that style of the internet. You know, before it was consolidated into a handful of tech giants.

That internet is still there alive and well, you just need to look a little harder for it. The best way I have found to stumble onto new blogs is to use these:

Kagi Small Web - Keep clicking Next Post and it will take you to random websites.
Bubbles.town - This is a fairly new addition. It is like HackerNews for personal blogs.

Of course it is all very well just writing into the void but what made social media so popular is the social aspect. Being able to comment on posts, like them and share them.

The IndieWeb has this too and you can like, comment, and reply to posts in the form of webmentions.

How Do Webmentions Work? #

For webmentions to work you need to have a sender and a receiver. The receiver in this case is your website, then sender is someone who wants to like or comment on your post.

To let other people know that you accept webmentions, you have to have to add a link to your webmention endpoin to your website head.

<link rel="webmention" href="{your_webmention_url}">

People can then send you webmentions using an HTTP request to your webmention URL:

curl -X POST {your_webmention_url} \
  -d "source={a_website_that_is_mentioning_you}" \
  -d "target={a_post_on_your_website}"

Of course all of that seems very manual and how do you even get a webmention URL?

Receiving Webmentions on Your Site #

You can host your own webmention server yourself but let's save that for another post.

The easiest way is to go to Webmention.io and type in your website. This is a great free service hosted by Aaron Parecki. It will then give you the option to sign in via an email address or GitHub if you mention your profile on your website.

Once signed in you will get your webmention URL which you can put as a link in your header. It will likely just include your website name as your username.

Mine for example is this:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/www.alexhyett.com/webmention">

This handles receiving webmentions from other peoples websites but what about people liking posts when you mention your blog post on Mastodon or Bluesky?

This is where Bridgy comes in. You can log in with your Mastodon account and it will monitor your posts for mentions of your website and send them in the form of webmentions.

Bridgy even has an option to monitor your RSS feed and automatically post to Mastodon for you. I don't use that as I have my own setup but it is a nice option.

Now you just need to display the webmentions somewhere on your site. You can do this by calling the webmention.io API. You will need to generate a token on their website which you can then use to receive your webmentions. Make sure to keep your API token secret.

As I am on Eleventy, I used this brilliant example on Brennan Kennith Brown website as my base and adjusted the way the webmentions are displayed to suit my site. Each time I build my site (with a 6h cache) it pulls down my webmentions. They are then formatted and displayed on my site.

This is how I render my likes and reposts for example with Tailwind CSS:

{% set interactions = mentions | webmentionsByTypes(['like-of', 'repost-of']) | sortWebmentionsByReceived %}
{% set hiddenInteractions = interactions.length - 51 %}
{% if interactions.length > 0 %}
<div>
  <h3>Likes & Reposts</h3>
  <div class="flex flex-wrap items-center gap-2">
    {% for interaction in interactions | head(51) %}
    <a href="{{ interaction.author.url if interaction.author.url else interaction.url }}"
       title="{{ interaction.author.name | unsupportedEmoji }}"
       target="_blank"
       rel="noopener"
       class="relative inline-block no-underline!">
      {% if interaction.author.photo and interaction.author.photo != '' %}
      <img src="{{ interaction.author.photo }}"
           alt="{{ interaction.author.name | unsupportedEmoji }}"
           loading="lazy"
           class="rounded-full w-12 h-12">
      {% else %}
      <span class="flex h-12 w-12 items-center justify-center rounded-full bg-tertiary font-mono font-bold text-(--header-color)">
        {{ interaction.author.name | unsupportedEmoji | truncate(1) }}
      </span>
      {% endif %}
      {% if interaction["wm-property"] == 'like-of' %}
      <span class="absolute -right-1 -top-1 flex h-5 w-5 items-center justify-center rounded-full border-2 border-(--bg-color) bg-(--secondary-color) text-[11px] text-[#e5484d]" aria-label="Like">
        <i class="fa-solid fa-heart"></i>
      </span>
      {% else %}
      <span class="absolute -right-1 -top-1 flex h-5 w-5 items-center justify-center rounded-full border-2 border-(--bg-color) bg-(--secondary-color) text-[11px] text-(--accent-color-alt)" aria-label="Repost">
        <i class="fa-solid fa-retweet"></i>
      </span>
      {% endif %}
    </a>
    {% endfor %}
    {% if hiddenInteractions > 0 %}
    <span class="font-mono text-sm text-(--text-color-light)">and {{ hiddenInteractions }} more</span>
    {% endif %}
  </div>
</div>
{% endif %}

The unsupportedEmoji filter I added as custom Mastodon icons where showing up as ????. This is just a simple filter to remove them:

eleventyConfig.addFilter("unsupportedEmoji", (text) => {
    return text.replace("????", "");
});

I created a TIL page to test out my webmentions and the Fediverse community were great at giving me examples to test: Setting up webmentions

One part I haven't automated yet is my "Want to interact with this post?" message. I show this on my website.

At the moment I have to manually copy the URL for the Fediverse post into my frontmatter field which then gets shown here. So the workflow is:

Publish post
Automated job mentions the post on Mastodon.
I then copy the Mastodon post URL into the frontmatter of the blog post.
Then update my site again.

I need to put add to my workflow to store the share URL to a database, then check for new additions when I build my site and have a script that updates the frontmatter.

Sending Webmentions to Others #

If you have managed to do part one then you have just become an amazing listener but it's not much of a conversation because you are not saying anything back!

If you have had your website for a while like me then chances are you have been saying nothing back for a while. Time to change that.

I wrote a script to go through all of my markdown files on my website and then write all the external URLs to a CSV file. export-external-links.js

I then wrote a separate script that checks the mentioned website to see if they accept webmentions and then sends a request to their webmention endpoint. process-webmentions.js

I would say out of all the links on my website a good 80% of them didn't accept webmentions so it is mostly restricted to indie bloggers who still use them.

That handles all the past requests. For sending new webmentions for posts I have published, I use n8n to monitor my RSS feed, pick out all the external links and then check for the existence of webmentions. Here is the n8n workflow if you wanted to adapt it for your own needs: Send Webmentions.json. I love using n8n these sort of workflows as it makes it really easy to test the flow and debug it.

What's Next #

I have everything working now with replies and likes from Mastodon. I recreated my Bluesky account recently and I am just going to use it to share my posts so I can give people another way to comment. All of my normal social media usage will still be on Mastodon.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

🤖 AI #

do we NEED generative AI? - We do have to ask ourselves, what do we really gain by using AI? Is the quality better than if you did it yourself? If it is then maybe you should invest more time in your own skills rather than using AI.

Cheap to write, expensive to own - Yes you can write code quicker but you end up with something that is possibly buggy, that you don't understand and you didn't enjoy making. There is still a place for AI in automating one-off jobs with throwaway scripts but if you the code is going to last make sure you read it properly.

Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers - I think this is a really good analogy. Sure there are some rockstar developers out there but most just generate unreadable spaghetti code. This is exactly what AI does but at a faster and much wider scale.

Lines of code got a better publicist - Code is a liability. Repeat that, code is a liability. The more code there is, the harder it is to maintain.

Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks - Despite being banned for being too dangerous it wasn't even that good. Anthropic really shot themselves in the foot with this marketing campaign.

AI-sphyxiation - We probably need another word as well for products that have been slowly ruined by AI code contributions.

📝 Blogging #

Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb - This all started with this post "No, I Won't Buy You A Coffee" and let's just say the IndieWeb didn't like it. Buy me a coffee is essentially a tip jar, it isn't the same as putting up a paywall and it isn't an advert either. I agree with Brennan on this. We have no problem signing up for subscriptions to billionaire corporations but when a human kindly asks you to support them if you like their work then we really should.

💻 Programming #

Integrating standard.site with My Hugo Blog - Once I get my Bluesky sharing sorted I will have a look at setting this up too. I am not sure why websites need to come up with even more things we need to implement in order for our sites to appear nicely on theirs.

🏢 Tech Industry #

Doing nothing at work - This is a great point. A lot of the work that companies were most thankful for came from taking initiative and having the time to implement it. If you are constantly working on tickets there is no time to innovate.

Surprise, pay $1000 - This is some sneaky tactics. I am not sure this would hold up in court.

🎮 Gaming #

Putt.day a daily mini golf game - This is really fun and well done. The one I played on the 2nd July even had a loop in it.

Pac-Man, but you're the ghost - I love this idea. I still suck at Pac-Man though.

📚 Books #

The Cypherpunk Library - A nice collection of public domain books with a cool UI.

🧠 Miscellaneous #

New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste - This is fantastic. I always thought it was crazy that we are surrounded by all this drinking water but we can't drink any of it.

Public Domain Image Archive - If you are looking for something a bit different for your blog images why not try one of these.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

As mentioned I have been getting into blogging a lot more recently. These are my recent posts:

📝 Blog Post - Getting back into blogging - I intentionally restrict the topics I write about in this newsletter but it has stopped me from writing about other stuff.

📝 Blog Post - Taking the unconventional path - I quit my job 3 weeks ago...

📝 Blog Post - Focussing on my fitness - I have been working out pretty regularly over the last month and seeing some progress.

💬 Quote of the Week #

How about we forget “move fast and break things” and instead embrace “go slow and keep things working”?

OK, yes this one was from me this week.

Getting back into blogging

Alex Hyett — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:44:31 +0000

It has been a while since I have sat down and wrote a blog post that is not directly related to programming or self-hosting. If I look back to 2023 I used to write about all sorts of different topics.

I was reading the post 📦 Don't put yourself in a box the other day and I realised I have been doing something similar.

My website doesn't get that much traffic at around 8000 visitors a month, so it is not that I am feeling pressure for my posts to be meaningful, but I have stuck myself in a genre box.

Even though I label myself as a “software developer” it isn't my entire identity, and I am sure those reading my blog have other interests as well. I shouldn't worry about overwhelming my readers as not that many people subscribe directly to my everything RSS feed (I don't think).

Even if they do, having something interesting to read regardless of whether it is technical or not, is surely a positive thing. My newsletter generally has a limited topic scope any way which is where most people read my content.

So with that said, I am going to start blogging more and try to get more involved with the IndieWeb. I have been fed up with all the big tech platforms for a while so it is time to embrace the indie side.

This week I have set incoming and outgoing webmentions on my blog. There is still a bit of tweaking to get the flow working properly, but it is a start.

Thanks to the wonderful people on the Fediverse I was able to test out most of the functionality see Setting up webmentions.

The general flow is:

I have a webmention endpoint set up on my blog thanks to webmention.io.
I use Bridgy to get the likes, reposts and comments and send them to my webmention endpoint.
When I build my blog it pulls down any webmentions from the site and displays them on the relevant posts.
When I publish a new post I have a n8n workflow that reads my RSS feeds and publishes new posts on my Mastodon (GotoSocial) account.
I have another n8n workflow that sends out all the webmentions for links mentioned in the post.
I then have to manually add the Mastodon link to my post frontmatter so that I can link to it on my website (this is the part I need to improve). This is just to show people where to put a comment.

I will do another post in the near future with how all of this works. I also added the bubbles.town widget to the bottom of all my posts.

There are still some things I want to do.

Fix the above manual link of the Mastodon post to my account.
Backfill all the posts with an equivalent GotoSocial post.
Set up Bluesky again (I previously deleted my account) to repost content.
Get comments that appear on my PeerTube videos to show up on my blog under the relevant video.
Implement the reply to logic, so I can directly reply to other indieweb posts.

Personal projects are more important than ever

Alex Hyett — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

3 years ago I did a video on "How to Build a Project That Will Actually Get You a Job". It is crazy how much has changed since then. I still think there is value in creating these projects to help your chances of getting a job, but they definitely don't have as much sway as they used to.

The reason of course is due to AI. How does a hiring manager looking at your profile know you didn't just vibe code the whole thing?

The main points I covered in that video still apply though. The code was never the important part of the project.

What matters most:

Deploying your project - Anyone can just vibe code something and have it run on their local machine. Getting the project live is a different skill set and not one that AI can easily help with.
Show your process - It is great that you built something, but I would be more interested in why you built it. When code is cheap it is worth spending time to think whether this should have been built at all.
Testing and Monitoring - Unless prompted, AI won't write tests for you. Even when it does those tests aren't always that meaningful. Make sure your write relevant tests that go through the happy and the unhappy paths of your code. Set up telemetry and dashboards to show you understand that side of things as well.

Of course there is more to personal projects beyond getting a job. I know at the end of a long day at work the last thing many people want to be doing is coding more. Personal projects however are a great way to learn new skills (assuming you don't vibe code it).

With more and more companies drinking the AI cool aid in the name of productivity, your personal projects might be the only way you get to flex those coding muscles.

Just like real muscles, if you don't use them you lose them and your programming skills will slowly atrophy.

This week I created a projects page on my website so I can start listing out the things that I am working on. I have a lot of unfinished projects that didn't make the cut or were never released to the public and a lot more projects I want to build in the future.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

🤖 AI #

Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade? - It is an interesting point. You used to need to know a lot about HTML, CSS and Javascript to be able to build a good website. Then frameworks came along and a lot of that knowledge disappeared. With everyone using AI, those that actually understand how things work will only become more valuable.

Vibe coding is the equivalent of me sketching a drawing of my dream car, it materializing in front of me, and then proclaiming “I MADE A CAR IT’S 80% DONE”. And then the first time I drove it the wheels would fall off, the engine would explode, and I would drive off a cliff. Seems fine.

From Vibe Coding off a Cliff by Dan Kim - The last 20% is always the hardest part, AI didn't change that. The 20% just got larger!

Please Use AI - Please don't replace human interaction with AI.

The dead economy theory - It does make you wonder what the end game is for AI. If companies replace all their workers with AI who is going to be left to buy their products.

Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC - That is pretty scary. I wonder how long until we all have to work on machines that aren't connected to the internet at all for our own safety.

💻 Programming #

SQLite is all you need for durable workflows - I still think Postgres is the way to go when you building out multi-user web applications. Especially if you need it to scale. For self-hosted applications with only a limited number of users then SQLite is certainly the easier choice.

Are you standard.site? - This seems similar to adding og: metadata to a website but makes your site more easily discoverable with ATProto. I don's use Bluesky any more, but I am going to look at adding this in to my site.

🏢 Tech Industry #

GTA 6 Developers Unionize - I wonder if we will see more unions for software developers cropping up as AI threatens the industry.

Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet? - I really hope the UK doesn't ban VPNs. I really need to look into decentralised alternatives to the internet before everything goes all 1984 on us.

Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min - Oh how kind of Meta to allow their employees 30 minutes of privacy. Choosing to work for Meta these days is already an odd choice, but why would anyone want to work for them now?

I keep getting floored by people saying programming as a job is “over”. I was jealous of engineers my whole life for having the ability to speak code with which they create software. The ability to speak code has never been more important than now, when we are able to delegate the code speaking. If you can’t understand what the AI wrote, you fall back on hope and trust, and I don’t think that’s such a good idea.

From Dragan Babić - Being able to code is still a superpower when everyone else treats it like a black box.

🧠 Miscellaneous #

I am retiring from tech to live offline - It is sad to see AI push people out of tech. At the same time I can see myself living an offline life in retirement.

Writing by hand makes us think better - I have started doing morning page again. I am not quite at the recommend 3 pages a day, but it does help me think better than writing on a computer.

💬 Quote of the Week #

It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause. He could pick up his law career exactly where he left off if he wanted to, but that is the furthest thing from his mind.

From Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss.

We are using AI wrong

Alex Hyett — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Over the last few months companies have gone from “you must use AI or you will get fired” to “use less AI or you will be fired”.

As you know, it all comes down to cost. Companies thought that they could replace some salaried developers by giving AI to the remaining staff. Now it seems a lot of companies are back peddling on that stance now that the true cost of AI is appearing.

AI has been heavily subsidised by investor money to try to get people hooked, however with AI companies not turning a profit they have to increase the price or restrict usage to keep going.

I have seen people reporting on Reddit that their companies have taken a U-turn and started restricting usage (obviously it is Reddit so take with a pinch of salt).

I keep seeing tutorials of how to set up your AI agents to do all sorts of tasks. These “skills” the AI agents possess is just a markdown file containing instructions of what commands to run etc.

Every time an agent wants to use one of these skills it has to read in the skill file which uses up tokens and then will execute on it, mostly in an indeterministic way.

The LLMs are a black box and the big providers are constantly tweaking how they work to try and save money or squash bad behaviour. A skill file that works now might not work the same in the future.

I understand for AI coding agents you might want it to use these tools without asking but for fairly deterministic processes I feel you would be much better off with a script that doesn't use any tokens at all.

In some cases, the skills contain a bunch of code snippets telling the AI how to run things, such as this slack-gif-creator example.

It was easy when AI was practically free just to run everything through an LLM and have it control the flow. With the costs rising I think less people will be inclined to just throw a markdown file at it and see what happens.

So, what's the alternative?

The obvious solution is to convert the process into a script but in some cases there will be pieces of the operation that still need AI.

Maybe the data comes in an unstructured format, and you require AI to format the data. You could be getting data from multiple sources, and you want AI to summarise it for you.

In these cases, having an LLM in the flow is useful, but if you can minimise where it is used it will cost a lot less. For a lot of small tasks, local AI models will likely be sufficient.

Let's say you wanted to create a custom daily briefing.

Instead of writing a skills file to pull down the weather, your calendar, and the latest news, you can turn it into a script.

Call the weather API to get today's weather and remove any parts you don't care about.
Call the calendar API and filter to just today's events.
Get a pre-aggregated RSS feed and look at today's stories.
Send the parts that need summarising to a local or cheap cloud AI model to summarise.

In this case it is likely only the weather that could do with a more personal touch. Everything else could be just put in a list.

Of course working out what can be scripted and what needs to go to an LLM requires some thought and problem solving, you know, actual engineering skills.

The AI companies want you to shove everything into a markdown file because they make more money, but that isn't how software developers should be working.

While AI is still available heavily subsidised and through subscription, use it to build tools that will still work when AI isn't financially viable any more.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

I am going to be limiting the number of links I put in this newsletter to 10-15 a week. I don't want to overwhelm everyone with too much information.

🤖 AI #

Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence - At least Steve seems more relatable than the other talks that have happened recently. Imagine promoting AI to graduating students when it is actively making the job market worse.

AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills - I think this is why developers see drastically different results from AI. If you are already a great programmer and are guiding the AI appropriately it can help but for if you are not, it can just make you worse.

I'm Tired of Talking to AI - It is so disrespectful sending AI responses to people. It is crazy that we live in a world where thinking for yourself is a superpower.

Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis - A CEO one-shots something in Claude and thinks that it is close enough to what developers produce that they don't need developers. Then wonder why the org isn't seeing the same productivity gains.

Various LLM Smells - I suspect we are going to see a lot of these in website designs going forward.

🛠️ Tools #

An Introduction to Meshtastic - With nations around the world introducing censorship and age verification I have been looking into things like Meshtastic and Reticulum. At the moment it seems only useful for short range messaging (a few miles) but this might improve in the future.

I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum) - Some good information about the different networks. Reticulum which I have talked about before looks particular good too.

💻 Programming #

Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM - This is cool, but they aren't entirely relying on the Raspberry Pi given the TLS termination is done by a VPS.

Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore - I learnt to program from books and I think having a separate medium actually helps you retain information more. With a book you have to look for the information and decide which bits are important to you. A chatbot just gives you the information which doesn't help you learn.

🔒 Security #

A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking - I showed a similar page last week. It is scary how much information is leaked by your browser.

🏢 Tech Industry #

Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce - More cuts. Cloudflare still has revenue of $665 million but they don't want to pay for workers.

🎮 Gaming #

SimCity 3k in 4k - I loved playing SimCity 3000 growing up. They also have SimCity 3000 unlimited on Steam for £5.

🧠 Miscellaneous #

Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014) - I have found if I am stuck on a programming problem that going for a walk helped. It is certainly healthier than asking an LLM.

Can we have the day off? - This is the issue I have with capitalism and corporate culture in general. If I complete my work faster I should get more time to myself, instead I just get more work. AI is just going to accelerate burnout in workers.

Wikipedia doesn't need my cash - Not long ago Wikipedia had big banner on the page asking for donations yet they are sitting on $290 million in the bank.

💬 Quote of the Week #

This is because the effects of a typical one or two-week vacation wear off almost immediately and that the whole point of most vacations is to merely take a break from work instead of resting for its own sake.

From the article “The Top 10 Career Myths We Should Stop Believing” by Paul Millerd.

What skills are still relevant?

Alex Hyett — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

It is a very difficult time for software engineers at the moment. Whether you like AI or not, it is having an impact on the software engineering job market.

Some companies are using AI as an excuse to layoff more staff, either because they over hired or because they are cutting expenses in order to spend more on AI.

There are even lots of reports of companies demanding their staff use AI for every task. I do agree to some extent that AI can make you more productive in the short term. I have certainly been able to complete more tickets in the last few months than I would have been able to do otherwise.

The use of AI does however come at quite a steep long term cost. Not only are developers forgetting how to write code as they rely more on AI, they are also no longer are able to keep a mental map of the codebase which is critical for debugging issues. Over the next few years we are going to see software get buggier, companies having more frequent and longer downtimes and internally codebases are going to get messier and harder to maintain.

I am hoping that companies who are currently forcing AI use will have a U-turn when they notice the long term impact and be more selective in how AI is used going forward.

If that doesn't happen however, what skills are still going to be relevant over the next few years that are unlikely to be replaced by AI?

This is what I still think is relevant now and will be going forward:

Testing #

If companies end up using AI to write all the code, then you still need to test it, one way or another. Of course, you could just get AI to write the tests which for the code itself might be fine, but you need to define what to test yourself.

I can see the AI apocalypse going one of two ways. AI causes more bugs in the software, and it is starting to affect the companies bottom line and reputation.

The company back peddles on using AI everywhere, and we go back to coding manually at least partially.
The company doubles down and wants you to use AI to write more tests.

Either way I think we are going to be expected to write more tests to ensure the AI code is doing what we think it should be doing.

If AI is writing the majority of code then I doubt unit tests are going to be that helpful. The majority of the effort is going to be writing integration tests for APIs and automated UI tests for the frontend.

System Design #

AI is great at adding features to an already well-organised codebase. However, if you use AI from the start there is no code structure for it to follow.

Knowing what good software looks like, how to structure the application so that it will be easier to maintain going forward is going to be very important.

This extends to the system as a whole as well. AI might be able to suggest the system design you need but unless you make it a requirement while you are coding, it won't be considered.

Ultimately, knowing which database to you use, when to introduce queues for certain tasks and understanding how to scale different components is your responsibility.

Debugging #

When trying to fix a bug with an unfamiliar codebase I find myself using debugging a lot. If you didn't write the code then you don't have the same mental map of the codebase which allows you to easily work out the issue. The only option is to go line by line and look at what data is entering each of the functions, to see why the code took a certain path.

This also means looking at the logs and not just asking Claude whenever an issue comes up.

Problem Solving #

Software engineering has always been about problem solving not code. You need to get a full picture of the problem and understand how code could help and more importantly when it isn't needed. Everything can't be solved with code, but AI is definitely going to try.

Every line of code is a liability and the best line of code is the one you didn't have to write. AI will have no problem writing code for a feature, but it won't ever stop to think whether the feature should have existed in the first place.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

🤖 AI #

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - It is interesting to see how much the system prompt changes. I am not sure how we are supposed to rely on these systems if they fundamentally change so much.

Atlassian enables default data collection to train AI - Are we all just going to have to self-host our own tools from now on. For my personal projects I just use Obsidian with the Kanban plugin.

OpenAI Privacy Filter - I am glad this is an open weight model as it you shouldn't be sending any PII data to a third party.

Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 - This is fun. I am not sure how useful it is but fun anyway.

Who owns the code Claude Code wrote? - This is an interesting one. If code generated by AI is deemed uncopyrightable (is that a word?) then surely companies will go back on using it everywhere. Given it is trained on stolen code I can see how it wouldn't be.

AI is making me dumb - I never use AI to write these newsletters or any of my blog posts. For code however, with work almost mandating the use of it, it can be so tempting to defer to it for everything.

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis - AI is going to create a whole generation of dumb engineers that don't know how to think or code. Maybe that is what they want so companies have to pay us less.

SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video - This looks cool, but I dread to think of the compute needed to generate these. I have tried video generation locally on my M2 Pro Mac Mini, and we are talking 30 minutes at CPU melting full speed to generate 5 seconds of questionable slop.

How fast is N tokens per second really? - For those running AI locally they often talk about tokens per second, but it is hard to understand how fast that is without actually seeing it. This helps a lot.

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes - There is so much happening in the LLM space right now. This is a good summary.

Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans - The era of subsidised frontier LLMs is slowly coming to an end. Let's hope the local models can compete before it gets too expensive.

GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes - I wonder how many companies are using Copilot review as a replacement for Human review.

🛠️ Tools #

Flipper One – we need your help - The Flipper Zero looked so cool when it came out. I didn't get one as I don't know what I would use it for. Equally, the One looks very cyberpunk, and I want one, but I don't know why.

Framework Laptop 13 Pro - I am likely good for computer hardware for at least another 5 years, but I can see my next computer being from Framework. I really don't like the way that Apple is heading.

💻 Programming #

Laws of Software Engineering - I think software engineers that actually understand these “Laws” and can apply them are going to become so valuable in a see of vibe-coders.

Your hex editor should color-code bytes - This is very cool. The first time I played around with hex editors was with a GameShark Cheat Cartridge for the N64.

The seven programming ur-languages (2022) - I never realised all the programming languages I know fall under the “ALGOL” family of languages.

🔒 Security #

GTFOBins - I have started running my AI coding agents inside a VM using Lima. It might protect against these types of exploits but who knows!

Click - It is amazing to see how much information can actually be gathered from the browser. Even your mouse movements can be recorded, it is quite creepy.

🎨 Design & UX #

How to make your text look futuristic - This is hilarious, why do we always pick the same styles for "future text".

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS - I moved my website over to Tailwind last year after using it a lot at work. I do feel like my HTML is now very bloated though.

Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay - The plain text UI tools mentioned here are so cool. More people should start with ASCII wireframes.

🏢 Tech Industry #

Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer - This is so true, especially point number 1.

The best way I’ve advanced my career is by changing companies.

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career - I definitely think my days of software engineer as a career are numbered. I will still make software just not for someone else. I don't mind using AI selectively on my own projects, but I don't want to be forced to use it.

Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud (Resolved) - I spoke about Railway last issue as a quick way to get your own ForgeJo instance started. It is still the quickest way but I wouldn't rely on it for your company git repository.

Google just spat in my face - It is really tough to be a web developer right now. I once thought I could always go freelance and build websites for companies, but I think that path is slowly dying. At least Google is doing it's best to make it that way.

🎮 Gaming #

DOS Zone - This is so cool. They have SimTower on here as well. I played that so much as a kid. It had to be installed using 4 floppies if I remember correctly.

📚 Books #

Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered - I never knew Pinocchio was quite so creepy. The donkey bit in the Disney movie was weird, but the book is on another level.

Technical Reading List - There is some good engineering reads on this page. OK there are only 3 books mentioned, but I felt it fitted in this category.

🧠 Miscellaneous #

Period tracking app has been selling data to Meta - Just the sort of information you don't want going to a big tech company who is known for using your data to sell ads. I am probably not the best person to make one of these apps but I feel like make a local alternative just so people have options.

Flipdiscs - These looks so cool. I am not sure I have the space for an art installation in my office but if I did!

💡 Today I Learned (TIL) #

I was having issues after killing a command which left my terminal writing ^[[A and ^[[B whenever I used the arrow keys. It turns out you can type stty sane to fix this!

💬 Quote of the Week #

How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits – starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive feedback loop.

From the article "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline".

GitHub is dead, What's next?

Alex Hyett — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I moved all of my projects off of GitHub back in August, but I still have to use GitHub for work, unfortunately.

You can see my contribution graph for the last year which is completely empty Friday - Sunday (4-day work week!). It is not that I don't do any coding at the weekends, but the code is all on my private server.

I chose to move my work off of GitHub due to the team becoming part of the Microsoft CoreAI team. I knew then it was only going to be a matter of time until GitHub was vibe coded into the ground.

In the last 6 months using GitHub just for work, there have been more than one occasion where I have been unable to complete my work due to problems with GitHub. Everything from pull requests not working, GitHub actions failing or just multiple pages on the site not loading.

GitHub is no longer a tool for professionals. #

GitHub's Enterprise SLA promise is the three-nines, 99.9% uptime. GitHub have tried to cover up how poorly they are performing by removing the aggregated uptime of all their services from their status page. There have been a lot of occasions of GitHub having issues and not reporting it. Even with those omissions, most of their services are below 99.7% uptime.

The only exceptions are Pages (99.95%) and Packages (99.97%), so static files , and even they aren't up 100% of the time.

If you want to see the true picture of GitHub's uptime there is a community run page called The Missing GitHub Status Page which shows that their actual aggregated uptime is a shocking 84.35%!

There is a nice graph showing exactly why this is:

Basically, everything went down hill when Microsoft acquired GitHub.

OK so uptime is a bit rubbish, but at least it is still a reliable git service, right? Right?

They can't even get the basics right meanwhile using your code to train their AI models.

Developers aren't happy myself included and many are finding new homes for their projects:

Where to move to? #

The obvious choice for open source projects is to move to Codeberg. This is where the majority of projects have moved to. I have my public repositories mirrored here as well: Alex Hyett - Codeberg.org.

Codeberg however doesn't like you to have too many closed source projects, as it mainly meant for FOSS software. Codeberg however is based on ForgeJo which you can host yourself.

I have my own private ForgeJo instance which hosted on my home server. My home server is just an old Dell Wyze 5070 running Debian.

I have another public server over at git.alexhyett.com which is running on a Hetzner box.

If you don't want all the hassle of running your own server, the quickest way to get one running is to use Railway. This is what I used when I first started as they have a free Hobby plan which gives you $5 a month in usage. Enough to cover most, if not all the costs of running a ForgeJo instance.

To get started:

Sign up to Railway (or use my affiliate link to get an extra $20 in credits)
Use the ForgeJo template and click Deploy Now.
Follow the instructions to set up an admin user. I would advise disabling registration.
All done!

If you have your own domain you can set up a git.yourdomain.com redirect, but you don't have to.

ForgeJo makes it really simple to migrate your projects from GitHub. It is a bit tedious to do one at a time, but it can be scripted.

Then next time GitHub is inevitably down you can smile smugly.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

I thought I would try a different layout this week and sort the links into categories so they are easier to scan and find what you are interested in. Over the next few months I will try to converge on a set list of categories.

🤖 AI & LLMs

Where the goblins came from - At this point it does feel like we are pleading with a child not to do something.

AI & Alignment - We can produce code faster, but that isn't what makes great software. Understanding the problem and communicating is still more important than writing code.

Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge - I have used Kimi for personal projects, and it can definitely be used instead of Claude in places. If you aren't vibe coding and giving it set tasks it does pretty well.

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - I am still fairly hands-on when I am coding with an agentic. Creating a ticket and getting a bunch of agents to do it for you still feels like vibe coding to me. I like to keep the amount of code I need to review to a minimum.

Agentic Coding Is a Trap - If you don't use your coding skills they will eventually whither and die. Even if you have to use agents for coding at work you should still and try to do some “artisanal coding” in your own time if you can.

Swatch Did What? (AI slop) - I have a Swatch watch which I wear most days. This is just gross.

The Pulse: Tokenmaxxing as a weird new trend - This does seem like a weird flex. I get AI can be useful but “burning” tokens to get to the top of a leaderboard is just nuts.

The Pulse: token spend breaks budgets, what next? - I thought it was just the big FAANG companies that were spending ridiculous amounts, but it seems to be everywhere, unfortunately.

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish - Personal projects that are for your benefit only, by all means vibe code. Hopefully it will only be you that it affects.

HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing - Anthropic is really trying to push out anyone trying to use their subscriptions for anything other than Claude.

Apple accidentally left Claude.md files in Apple Support app - It is not that surprising that Apple is using AI internally to build their products. I mean, come on have you seen the latest Mac release. You don't get inconsistent corners with well thought out design!

Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months - Wow $2,000 per month, per engineer is crazy. I get that $24k is less than the cost of another developer but still!

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage - First they help you, then they take credit.

Programming Still Sucks - Every company seems to have a cron job that is doing most of the heavy lifting of the company and no-one is around who understands it.

💻 Dev Tools & Coding

From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth - I am sure I have mentioned Better Auth before. It does look like a good and free option for authentication.

Red Squares — GitHub outages as contributions - Why not! It does look pretty bad when it is all red like this.

A desktop made for one - I wonder whether the time it takes to build all these yourself is worth it?

🎨 Design & UX

Laws of UX - With more developers expected to just use AI for the frontend we might need to use this as a reference.

🔒 Privacy & Security

LinkedIn scans for 6,278 extensions and encrypts the results into every request - Just why! I hate that I have to keep my LinkedIn account if I ever want a job in the future.

Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac - I saw Notepad++ for Mac come up on another site and nearly linked to it. I am not saying this vibe coded Mac version contains malware but who knows!

🏢 Tech Industry & Business

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs - More layoffs!

Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14% - And some more. Who wants to learn carpentry and farming?

Ask.com has closed - Bye bye Jeeves. Given a lot of people are moving to AI for search I feel they so could have revived this. Who doesn't want a slightly sarcastic British butler giving them search results.

X is a Cesspit - I left Twitter a long time ago. I am always surprised by friends, colleagues and otherwise intelligent people who are still on there.

🎮 Gaming

Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license - Now you can print out a controller and pretend you are playing with your new Steam Machine! Although I heard a rumour that Valve took a big delivery that could be them!!

🧠 Miscellaneous

Cal Newport's anti-brain rot rules - This is good advice. For me:

Read every day - ✅
Write and don't delegate to AI - ✅ (you're reading it now)
Go on thinking walks - ✅
Leave your phone somewhere so you need to get up to use it - 😕
Get a skill or hobby - ✅ (mine is playing guitar)

💬 Quote of the Week #

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” - Benjamin Disraeli

From “Fear-Setting The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month” by Tim Ferriss.

Are AI Agents Worth It?

Alex Hyett — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I have been watching a lot of videos this week around AI agents and what people are doing with them. I never jump on anything when it is in the middle of a hype cycle and prefer to let the dust settle before looking into things. Otherwise, you can end up wasting a lot of time on things that aren't worth it.

OpenClaw rose to fame when it was released a few months ago becoming the most starred repository on GitHub. It currently has 363k stars, even React only has 245k stars.

It made headlines but not always for the best reasons, from their skills containing malware to agents going rouge and writing disparaging blog posts or achieving "inbox zero" in the fastest way possible.

Apparently things have got better since the creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger got acqui-hired by OpenAI. ClawHub the skills database now has security scans on all the skills and there have been several security vulnerabilities that have now been patched.

There are however still a lot of complaints from users on Reddit about how unreliable OpenClaw is and how many of their operations stop working after a few days.

Naturally there has been a flurry of competitor agents that have been released that claim to be better than OpenClaw:

Hermes Agent
Perplexity Computer
PicoClaw
ZeroClaw
Nanobot
NanoClaw
Nullclaw

Hermes in particular looks quite mature (in relative terms) and seems to be easier to setup than OpenClaw.

What people are doing with AI agents? #

There seems to be no end for uses for AI agents that people are developing. The top ones I have seen:

Daily briefing - Get a customised morning briefing with information from various sources such as what is on your calendar for the day and top news stories.
Email triage - We get bombarded with so many emails, some people let the LLM sort them and even respond in some cases!
Data extraction - converting data from emails and reports into a JSON format for uses with other services.
Research tasks - This could be doing research for content creation or for job applications.

In some cases, people are using tools like OpenClaw for vibe-coding instead of using Claude Code or other coding agents.

A lot of the use cases I have seen could have been done with a script and a cron job. Obviously talking to an AI on your phone to set these things up is a lot easier than doing it manually on computer, so I see the appeal, but you always have to be aware of the ongoing token cost.

I can imagine that vibe coding a tool this way is likely to use considerably more tokens than using something like Claude Code.

Personal considerations #

For me personally, it would be useful for getting ideas for YouTube videos and being able to outsource some research.

I wouldn't ever give an AI agent access to my emails even read-only. AI agents are still vulnerable to prompt injection so any information you give it has the ability to be leaked to others or can perform unwanted tasks on your system.

AI agents should always be completely isolated from your computer and your data. Don't give it access to anything you wouldn't be happy being leaked on the internet or completely deleted.

I am thinking of setting up Hermes on an isolated VM on my server and giving it very limited to access to some services on my home network to see what can be automated.

The key is to always maintain a human in the loop for anything the agent does and treat any information the agents gets from the outside world as hostile.

Have you started using AI agents at all? If so I would love to hear what your use cases are.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

As I mentioned last time I was getting quite burnout, so I took a couple of weeks off over Easter. Naturally there is a quite a backlog of interesting stuff to cover this week.

📝 Article - Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech - Not overly surprising that the big ad tech companies are pro age verification. Expect even more targeted advertising.

📝 Article - Mistral AI Releases Forge - I am surprised that so many companies have been freely giving all their data over to big AI companies. It is good to see there are some more options coming up for models trained on private data.

📝 Article - Have a fucking website - This annoys me so much too. I don't have Facebook or Instagram which makes it annoying when businesses don't have a website to list basic information.

📝 Article - Despite Doubts, Federal Cyber Experts Approved Microsoft Cloud Service - I have used both AWS and Azure, the latter definitely seems more cobbled together than AWS.

📝 Article - The Old Internet is Still Here - I have been adding more and more personal blogs to my own RSS feed. There is more out there than just the big tech companies.

📝 Article - Some things just take time - AI is making it easier to create software but often it doesn't last. Good software like everything takes time to make.

🛠️ Tool - Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator - With LocalStack's community edition getting sunset last month it is good to see alternatives popup. Also, checkout MiniStack.

📝 Article - You are not your job - The layoffs in tech are still brutal with AI seeming to replace what it means to be a software engineer.

📝 Article - A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon - I loved playing this game as a kid and recently enjoyed playing it again on my iPad thanks to Apple Arcade. It is so well optimized, written by 1 person in assembly!

📝 Article - TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression - This doesn't make AI models any smaller, but it does reduce the memory consumption of context windows. Anything that makes local AI more feasible is a plus.

📝 Article - Personal Encyclopedias - This is a cool idea. I am not sure about passing this sort of thing off to AI but as long as it is heavily reviewed it could be worthwhile.

🧩 Demo - ISBN Visualization - Something similar to this came up last year. This one is from Anna's Archive and is still quite cool.

📝 Article - If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos - The deadline for this just passed. I hope you managed to opt out in time. I moved all my private repos to a self-hosted ForgeJo last year as I knew this was coming.

🧩 Demo - Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables - It is down to 42.8% at the time of writing. This is obviously going to vary a lot on the weather at the time.

📝 Article - Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week - I am not sure I could trust anyone who would wear smart glasses.

📝 Article - Who's Teaching the Juniors? - I might need to get back to teaching on YouTube to do my bit to help. How else will juniors learn.

🎓 Guide - I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog - This looks like a cool tool for simple diagrams.

📝 Article - Do your own writing - I always write my own blog posts and video scripts, otherwise it is not going to be unique. Writing always helps me think as well, why would you want to outsource that?

🎓 Guide - Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018) - This is genius!

📝 Article - The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode - The number of things uncovered in the Claude Code source code is hilarious. You can really tell the whole thing is vibe coded.

📝 Article - Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only - They don't want to be called Microslop but persist on forcing AI into their products while also caveating that it is for entertainment purposes only.

📝 Article - Oracle slashes 30k jobs - Even more layoffs thanks to AI. “The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure”.

📝 Article - Slop is not necessarily the future - AI is getting better at writing clean code but if given free rein it still produces slop.

📝 Article - OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says - The fact that companies can do this and get the support from the US government is disgusting.

🧩 Demo - GitHub's Historic Uptime - AI coding going well for Microsoft then.

🛠️ Tool - OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio - This might be quite good for screen recording for my YouTube videos.

📝 Article - We intercepted the White House app's network traffic - A government created app shouldn't have this many calls to 3rd parties.

🎓 Guide - Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide - This is a great visual breakdown of how Claude Code works.

📝 Article - Email obfuscation: What works in 2026? - I have been getting more spam recently. I am going to try some of these techniques out.

📝 Article - It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked - The fact that Anthropic try and take down everyone sharing their code when their whole business model is built on stolen data is so hypocritical.

📝 Article - Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - This is great. Kids really shouldn't be reliant on screens from such a young age.

📝 Article - LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions - When will the privacy invasion stop? I am glad I rarely use LinkedIn.

🛠️ Tool - Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac - Interesting! I wonder how this compares with other models.

🛠️ Tool - I built a frontpage for personal blogs - I like the HackerNews style UI. I am going to have to bookmark this and add some more blogs to my RSS feeds.

📝 Article - Components of a Coding Agent - As with all tools it is important to understand how they work under the hood and not just treat them as black boxes.

🛠️ Tool - Music for Programming - The website is cool even if you don't plan on listening to anything.

🧩 Demo - Are We Idiocracy Yet? - I haven't seen Idiocracy, but it is crazy how closely the world can be compared to dystopian futures.

📝 Article - Protect your shed - It is sad that those of us that like programming now need to have personal projects to be able to use our skills.

🎓 Guide - Git commands I run before reading any code - This is cool, I never thought to do this on codebases.

📝 Article - I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii - Because why not!

🧩 Demo - Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D - This is cool idea. It only seems to work on desktop in case you try on mobile.

🛠️ Tool - LittleSnitch for Linux - This looks great, shame I am not on Linux.

🛠️ Tool - Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft - This is so neat. I better not show my kids this otherwise there will be no end of things they want me to print.

📝 Article - Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? - I am fed up with all these big tech companies trying to extract as much money as possible from everyone.xx

👾 Game - Dark Castle - This might be nostalgic for long time Mac users.

📝 Article - I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack - You can do so much with a simple VPS from Hetzner. You really don't need everything hosted in the cloud. It is usually cheaper not to.

🎓 Guide - I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI - Qwen also released Qwen 3.6 which is supposed to be even better than Gemma 4.

🧩 Demo - Make It Myself - Sums up vibe coding perfectly.

📝 Article - Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012) - I always feel better with at least 8 hours sleep but struggle to find enough hours in the day to make that possible.

🎓 Guide - Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008) - I have never written a compiler, but I could see how you could learn a lot.

📝 Article - Backpacks got worse on purpose - Enshittification isn't just for tech, even backpacks have the same issue.

📝 Article - Do you even need a database? - For most small projects the filesystem is just as good as a database.

🛠️ Tool - Nirvana Live at Dreamerz 1989-07-08 : Nirvana : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - Any Nirvana fans here?

🛠️ Tool - fikrikarim/parlor: On-device, real-time multimodal AI - This is cool, Gemma 4 is seriously capable. I am sure there are all sorts of uses for this.

📝 Article - Stop Using Ollama - I personally use LM Studio, and it does seem the better of the tools.

📝 Article - The Discipline of Showing Up - Especially in the creator economy consistency is everything.

📝 Article - Eat Your Words - I think with local models getting better and better the big AI companies are really going to struggle justifying the investments that have been made.

🛠️ Tool - Slop Cop - This is cool. A bit like Hemingway Editor but for AI.

🎓 Guide - Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner - Hetzner is definitely the way to go even with their recent price increases.

📝 Article - Vercel April 2026 security incident - FYI if you are using Vercel at all.

🐦 Tweet - Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page - Apparently this is hidden in the small print but still not great.

📝 Article - All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027 - This is great news. Generally what is required in the EU is made worldwide as it costs more for manufacturers to make 2 versions. Such as EU mandating USB-C everywhere.

📝 Article - Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training - I am glad I don't work for Meta. I wonder if employees will resign over this, they should.

📝 Article - Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan? - And so the rug pull begins!

📝 Article - Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model - I have tried this model for small tasks on my 32GB Mac, and it did well, although naturally not as fast as cloud models.

🧩 Demo - Website streamed live directly from a model - I tried this out with a few of things I am knowledgeable about, and it did a good job.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

I did a poll in my last issue asking if you preferred the modern template or the plain text version. These were the results, so I will be sticking with the modern layout going forward.

Thank you to those who voted.

💬 Quote of the Week #

I feel that the big ideas come from these periods. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.

From Why You Need a "Deloading" Phase in Life by Tim Ferriss.

Dealing with AI burnout

Alex Hyett — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I feel like I am getting burnt out from AI at the moment. It is everywhere in tech and if you work as a software engineer you are no doubt using it or being told to use it every day.

It is not that I fear I am going to be replaced by AI, but more that it is going to replace the parts of the job that I actually enjoy.

Yes part of getting into programming was because I enjoy building things and with AI you can build things a lot faster, but what is lacking is the problem solving, coming up with creative solutions and the craft.

It is no coincidence that the first issue of this newsletter was titled, "Programming = Creativity 🎨". I still believe that programming is a creative profession that involves solving problems and designing solutions.

I definitely don't fit completely into the anti-AI camp, I use AI most days but not every day.

Mostly I use AI for:

Prototyping some UI concepts.
Writing boilerplate code such as converting JSON into Typespec of C# classes.
Writing unit tests, with a fair bit of hand holding.
Asking about the odd obscure bug.
Writing one off scripts for converting data.

The main thing is that I don't let AI do the actual work, especially if I am going to the be one responsible for it, and it has my name associated with it.

A lot of these use cases also don't need frontier models and can be run with a local model on your own machine.

I have never enjoyed reviewing code, other than for junior developers where it can be used as a learning exercise to share knowledge. Reading and understanding someone else's code is always harder than code you have written yourself.

At least when the code is written by a trusted developer you would hope they have done some due diligence and actually tested their code before putting for review. With AI written code you have none of these guarantees.

It feels like everyone is obsessed with agentic coding at the moment. Even those who have never written a line of code in their life are vibe coding applications and prototypes that do look from the casual observer quite impressive.

In reality though, there is large gap between a prototype you have put together in Claude Code to making something production ready. It is always the last 10% that takes the most time. For the non-engineers who have vibe coded something in an hour, this nuance is lost. There is an assumption here that coding is easy, if I can do this in an hour why aren't you doing the same?

As always, technological advancements aren't giving us back time they are demanding more out of our working hours to the point of burnout. Even if you don't want to use AI to write all the code for you, the bar has been raised as to what it is expected of you. Code quality and ethics be damned.

At the end of the day it isn't your manager who is going to be on call if the AI written code has a bug in it at 1 am.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

I think this is a large part of the AI burnout. I don't select AI articles on purpose but 29 of the 39 links below are directly related to AI with a few other indirectly related. It is just the nature of the news at the moment.

📝 Article - A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification - Age gating certain websites I understand to a certain extent, but bundling into the operating system is a big no from me.

📝 Article - Leaving Google has actively improved my life - I pretty much completely de-googled last month. Obviously my YouTube channel is still tied to a Google account, but it is a free one which I don't use for emails.

📝 Article - MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98% - I haven't found a need to use MCP servers in my limited use of AI, but if you do, you might want to look at this.

📝 Article - Microgpt - So much of AI is a black box. This is worth a read to understand how these big models work at a fundamental level.

🧩 Demo - I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported - At the moment the AI companies are running at a loss. It is like the early days of most services. At some point they will need to introduce ads or up the costs.

📝 Article - AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder - I think most senior engineers know that lines of code are a liability. Reviewing code for mistakes is a lot harder than actually writing the code yourself. The expectation of what can be produced just increased as well.

📝 Article - When does MCP make sense vs CLI? - MCPs are essentially simplified defined APIs for LLMs. If they can use CLIs then that is often the better option and apparently cheaper in terms of token use as well.

📝 Article - The nature of the job - This sums up my thoughts exactly. I don't look forward to Monday's any more. I would like to get back to enjoying programming which involves problem solving not babysitting an LLM.

💬 Thought - Fucking Vibe Coding - I would not want to work at one of these companies. Although I can see it is difficult to work at any company that doesn't have similar thoughts.

🛠️ Tool - Code Corners - This is quite cool, especially as I try to avoid hosting projects on GitHub as much as possible.

📝 Article - Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes - I mentioned this article a few weeks ago. I am glad Ars Technica took a stand against AI generated content. We really don't need more AI generated articles.

🧩 Demo - The Xkcd thing, now interactive - I love this, it would be great to see more of these.

📝 Article - I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project - This is sad and just goes to show how far Google and the like have fallen. If you suffer from this the correct thing to do is to go round and try and email everyone who is linking to the wrong project.

📝 Article - Agentic Engineering Patterns - There is some good advice here and most of it applies even if you aren't doing agentic coding. Things such as use TDD and not inflicting unreviewed code on reviewers.

📝 Article - Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity - I have seen this a lot throughout my career. The code that just works doesn't get as much credit as the overengineered solution. I find writing a list of your achievements throughout the year can help a lot.

🎓 Guide - Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide - When it comes to AI I would much rather use a local model than a cloud one that I have to pay for. There a probably hundreds of use cases where small fine tuned models could be useful.

📝 Article - The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying - If a fake painting is forgery than a LLM produced code is a forgery too. The only reason AI code works is because it is copying from someone else.

📝 Article - A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines - Engineering rule number 1. Don't trust user input. Yet here they are getting code generated and committed from user input 🤦‍♂️.

📝 Article - Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories - We are likely to see more of these attacks especially as developers struggle to properly review code due to the sheer number of changes due to AI.

📝 Article - Stop Sloppypasta - This is a pet peeve of mine. If you can't be bothered to write it then why should I be bothered to read it.

📝 Article - Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? - I loved this article. Many seem to justify the uses of AI based on the fun things it can do. The whole thing has been designed by billionaires to get rid of as many workers as possible.

📝 Article - Every layer of review makes you 10x slower - Reviews are definitely the bottleneck and they should be. They are the last line of defence before slop gets committed. The larger the code review the harder it is to review and insure that you haven't missed anything.

📝 Article - Software Harm Reduction - I think it is going to get harder and harder to find software that hasn't been touched by AI. I am not totally against using AI in your codebase but it is a slippery slope between generating boilerplate code and vibe coding whole features.

📝 Article - A sufficiently detailed spec is code - This is the crux of the matter. If you really want an LLM to produce code that works properly then you need to be very specific in your prompt. To the point where you are basically writing pseudocode anyway.

🛠️ Tool - Three new Kitten TTS models – smallest less than 25MB - Text To Speech is one of those AI areas that I think is OK morally speaking as long as you avoid cloning other peoples voices for nefarious purposes....

📝 Article - Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode - Anthropic don't really have a mote, all the frontier AI models are pretty good. They are desperately trying to lock people into the ecosystem so they can raise the prices later.

📝 Article - Trust and Faith in Our Web - When AI first came out, I used to generate images for my blog posts, but I removed them all and left only those with my own drawings (#1, #2). If I ever make enough money for this I will hire some artists for my newsletter issues. Sacha's work looks particularly good!.

📝 Article - How I'm Productive with Claude Code - I like to see how other developers are using agentic coding tool to see what I am missing out on.

🛠️ Cheat Sheet - Claude Code Cheat Sheet - A useful cheatsheet for those using Claude Code.

📝 Article - LiteLLM Python package compromised by supply-chain attack - I do use LiteLLM, luckily the Docker version isn't compromised.

📝 Article - So where are all the AI apps? - I think a lot of code is getting produced with AI but very little makes it to production. There is a large gap between vibe coding something that works on your machine and getting it ready to be used by others.

🐦 Tweet - Goodbye to Sora - There are still plenty of places to generate AI videos. I have tried local AI videos, and it took half an hour to generate a 5-second video while my PC screamed at me. I dread to think of the environmental impact of these video generators.

📝 Article - Is anybody else bored of talking about AI? - 👋

📝 Article - Thoughts on slowing the fuck down - A large part of an engineers job should be thinking about the problem and coming up with an elegant solution for it. People seem to be delgating their thinking in the name of speed and productivity.

📝 Article - Apple Just Lost Me - I have turned off automatic updates on my iPhone due to this new update. I do have a credit card attached to my Apple Wallet, so hopefully that will be enough.

📝 Article - Quantization from the Ground Up - If you are trying to understand quantization then this is a great article.

📝 Article - 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars - This is an interesting dashboard showing the increase in AI generated code. Of course most of the code is going to be in new vibe coded projects.

📝 Article - Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy - Of course they are using your code to train AI. This is why we should limit ourselves to local models where possible.

📝 Article - The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos - It sucks that this is the world we live in where privacy is dead.

💬 Quote of the Week #

The rational solution would be as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred.

Circling back to this quote from Bertrand Russell's article “In Praise of Idleness” from 1932. I will happily let AI take over the work if it means we all get UBI and can work fewer hours. I don't think that is the direction this world is going in unfortunately.

I finally released my app

Alex Hyett — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

This week the app I have been working on for the past year has finally been released. I first wrote about this app in “Is Cursor worth it for developers?”, back in March 2025.

The initial version started as a vibe coded project to see what was possible. I had never programmed anything in Swift before so getting the initial draft out using Cursor was quite useful.

So why then did it take a year to release the final version?

As a lot of people have realised, LLMs can be great for quickly prototyping something but the code they produce isn't necessarily production quality. The more I tested the application the more bugs I found.

I ended refactoring large parts the codebase to make it maintainable and learning a lot of Swift along the way.

Apple also released iOS 26 with the glass interface that I still haven't got used to. That broke a few things but also made a few other features better too.

You can find more about the app here: HabitTed - Habit Tracker and on its app store page ‎HabitTed - App Store.

Overall I found the process of releasing the app quite painless. I have heard people complain about the back and forth with Apple trying to get their apps approved, but I found the process fairly smooth.

I suspect this is largely because this is a simple, completely local application. There is no tracking, or calls to any third party (including myself) everything remains on device. I sent the app for review on Friday 6th March, and it went live on Wednesday 11th March. It took another day before you could find it in search, but it is there now.

So why did I add to the hundreds of other habit trackers available in the app store?

My wife and I tried quite a few habit trackers, and they either had UIs that we didn't like, or worked fine but required a monthly or yearly subscription to unlock the most basic features.

Streaks - This is a nice free option and is fine if you don't have many things that you want to keep track of. I wasn't overly keen on the UI though and preferred something in a list format. I also didn't need the health features.
Grit - This one seems to get a lot of promotion but has a lot of tracking built and requires a $1.99 - $9.99 monthly subscription!
HabitKit - Another one that gets a lot of promotion. Again requires a $1.99/month or $11.99/year subscription to use it.

As I mentioned in Pricing my apps fairly I don't believe in charging a monthly subscription unless it really warrants it. To be fair the above apps also have a one time payment option, but it costs $24.99 - $29.99.

What happened to apps that cost about as much as a cup of coffee?

HabitTed can be used for free for up to 6 habits. If you want unlimited habits, multiple reminders, archive and restore, import and export and to support me as a developer, than it's $3.99, about the price of a Venti Latte ☕️.

I am not expecting to make much money from this app, I built it for my wife as a side project. If I can cover the yearly Apple Developer Licence I will count it as a win.

If you would like to try it out and preferably give it a favourable review in the App Store I would be grateful! HabitTed - Habit Tracker

❤️ Picks of the Week #

👾 Game - Sandboxels - This is fun to play with. I am sure there are all sorts of combinations you can do with this.

📝 Article - A beginner's guide to split keyboards - I have always been intrigued by split keyboards. They look really cool. I am not sure how I would get on with them.

📝 Article - An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward - Part 4 of the AI agent that posted a blog post bad-mouthing the project owner for not merging his PR.

📝 Article - I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure - There is definitely a lack of European options. I have tried to move as much as possible to European versions, but I still have quite a lot of US stuff.

📝 Article - I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs - This is a good one for cleaning up merged branches.

📝 Article - Be wary of Bluesky - Even though Bluesky is supposed to be decentralised as with all VC backed companies they are bound to go against there users at some point. Unlike ActivityPub it appears to be incredibly expensive to run your own.

📝 Article - How to fold the Blade Runner origami unicorn (1996) - If you like origami you might appreciate this.

📝 Article - The happiest I've ever been - I need to go through and work out what I really love doing. I am sure I am not the only one who is getting a bit burnt out with AI being used everywhere.

📝 Article - Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine) - I have always been fascinated with game development. One day I will get round to making a game.

📝 Article - Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server - Microslop really hate us referring to LLMs as slop generators. If no one is using their AI how are they going to justify the billions they have spent on it.

📝 Article - OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub- I really don't get the hype around OpenClaw!

📝 Article - Build Awesome's Kickstarter is Cancelled - I use 11ty for my website, and it is great. I am not sure what this rebrand is going to mean for the future of 11ty. I will keep using it for now but if they succumb to enshitiffication then I will be looking elsewhere.

🎸 Tuner - Remotely use my guitar tuner - This is just fun. At the time of adding this link in my article it appears to be nighttime where the author is so you can't see the dial just a red dot.

📝 Article - The web is bearable with RSS - I wish more people would use RSS. This newsletter is available via RSS if you don't get round to reading my emails.

📝 Article - Why I Don’t Vibe Code - I never get the same satisfaction from vibe coding then building something myself. Your prize for vibe coding is often a spaghetti mess of code that you don't understand.

📝 Article - The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck - When reviewing code by a trusted developer you know they have tested the code themselves and are happy enough with it to put their name on it. With AI you don't have that ownership and the review takes a lot longer.

📝 Article - Cloudflare crawl endpoint - I am not sure what the plan here is with Cloudflare but if you don't want people scraping your site you might want to disallow CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler in your robots.txt.

📝 Article - Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025) - I loved building things with Lego as a kid, and it is crazy to think that Lego from the 1970s will still work seamlessly with Lego made today.

📝 Article - The dead Internet is not a theory anymore - Unfortunately now every comment, video, photo, and blog article you have to assume isn't real.

📝 Article - “This is not the computer for you” - I had originally dismissed the MacBook Neo. After all it is powered by the chip in an iPhone 16 Pro. However, I am not the target audience for this laptop. For a Chromebook alternative this is a good option and when I come to buy a laptop for my children it will definitely be an option.

📝 Article - What do coders do after AI? - I am definitely in the second group of developers. I have been coding since I was 8, and I will continue to do it even as a hobby if I change careers.

🛠️ Tool - Hammerspoon - I have been using iOS shortcuts but this looks good for automating things.

💬 Quote of the Week #

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

From In Praise of Idleness.