DEV Community: Joel del Pilar

Claude paid our code debt

Joel del Pilar — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:48:58 +0000

Let me give you some background

Code debt, we all know it's there and we all have once or twice (multiplied with X) contributed to it. As developers we all are working towards some kind of deadline where feature X must be done at a certain point. Often the code we write is needed by someone else in the team and vice versa. Over the years this has somehow created a kind of tolerance towards code debt. "We fix that later, it's not critical" - heard that one before?

In the recent years I have been involved in a in-house project at my work. Time has been a factor where we needed to ship new features kind of quickly, so that we could get feedback fast from users while also attract new users to the platform.

I started working on this project as an intern and had very good guidance for senior devs. Later I became one who took on new interns and as I grew in my role and got a better understanding of the code I soon realised that we had quite a lot of debt in our code.

Same same but different

In one specific area we noticed that our code was inconsistent and that a huge debt was left for the future. That was in our error handling.

I think that the project started of in a good way and that there was a thought around how to handle this but along the way and with several people doing their on take on it, it all got a bit messy. We had unclear error messages presented to our users, unclear crashes, success in client but error on server - yeah it was messy.

How to paid code debt in 2026

I took it upon myself to start investigating and since this project nowadays has a AI first policy I invited my buddy Claude to the table.

My IDE of choice is Cursor and I use Claude Code within my Cursor environment. And this is how I went about making our first repayment:

Plan mode
In this mode you can create a solid work plan for the AI to follow. Since our project is a respectable size I started to prompt Claude to analyze the code base in steps.

I started to ask Claude to analyze how errors where handled through out the app, analyze the code for the client and for the backend, api, interfaces and so on.

In every iteration I asked Claude to document the findings and the final result was a comprehensive analyze of error handling for the entire app.

Next step, action plan. Still in plan mode I asked Claude to create an action plan for the report, all suggestions needed to be documented in a action plan file so that I could easily review it.

I must say that I was a solid plan but I hade some ideas that I wanted to incorporate in the plan. One of those ideas was custom errors. I wanted a good way to send specific error messages to the user that where meaningful.

Action
With this info we created a 8 phase action plan and started working, or should I say Cluade started working (haha). For each phase I hade Claude make a todo-list and after each phase I reviewed the changes and made a commit.

Through out the process Claude made a impressive job, and that's not easy to admit! In a few cases I had to remind to format, typecheck and in one case he forgot to use the custom error - here is where your review as a developer is important! Our knowledge and vision is not always clear to the AI and it's our job to make sure good quality and clean code is provided.

Paying code debt is easier than ever

My conclusion of this experience is that paying code debt is easier than ever today! You just need to take it step by step, clear instructions and validate the results one by one.

If I should estimate how many hours this work would have taken me if I did it manually my guess is somewhere around 40-60h - with Claude code it took me 4h!! That to me, is crazy.

Some thoughts

Agents and models today has gotten so far and so good that we can be so much more efficient. What ever tool you prefer, let it do the tedious work that you put of for so long. Let is get you started on the amazing idéas you have, be creative and build awesome stuff.

We went from AI optional to AI Essential

Joel del Pilar — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:53:48 +0000

Everyone is using AI nowadays right? I read somewhere that in 2025 about 51% of professional developers uses AI in someway in their daily work. I wonder what the percentage is for dev's that uses AI to write their code?

Let's face it, it's not that easy to let go of the craftsmanship that we as developers has put a lot of time and effort in to refine. I totally understand why someone would write their own code, the sound of the keyboard, the feel when you write that perfect function, we all love that!

I love my job as a developer, it was my escape from being stuck in construction to become a developer, to pick up and refresh the knowledge that I once had. And just when I got it all figured out... along came AI. AI haven't taken my place as a junior but, it has transformed how I perform my work, how I approach task, issues and complex code.

Background

At Eyevinn Technologys we are streaming and media consultants but we are also innovators and builders. We have this amazing in-house project that is Open Source Cloud. Im not going in to details on what OSC - it's not the point of this post, but you can find out here. What I want to emphasize is the way we have transitioned our work when developing and refining this platform.

The transition
In the beginning we worked as common dev teams work, you know, sprints, coding, reviewing and so on. This was about 2 years ago. We had ChatGPT and also Claude was coming along. I remember how I used to copy paste code snippets and asking questions - this was really helpful at times but hallucinations could not be ignored, as we all knew back then.

Last year, 2025, in the late fall the thing that only happen to other - apparently high performers (according to my psychologist Im one lol) happened to me, I got burned out. It has been a journey to get back, slowly but steady.

Where I'm I going with this?

Well, when I got back there had been som changes. I was no longer on the assignment that I had before but to get back in the game I got to start working on our in-house project, OSC.

This time Im no longer copy pasting code snippets to my Claude desktop app. Im using Claude within Cursor and its not optional. The new policy we have now is to always start with a prompt and every commit has to be written together with an Agent.

This has totally transformed how I work, it has taken a lot of mental burden off my shoulders, not knowing how to start many times when a new ticket is assigned to me.. yeah still the junior dev here!

Today, writing this, Im currently doing my third week, working half-time. The honest truth and perhaps the sucker punch I diden't se coming is - I've got more work done, working less. No more mental pain debug code, and more energy when I close the laptop at the end of the day!

Final thoughts
As a developer in these times I think it's key to remember that we always through the years have had the need to adapt to new ways of doing our work. When frameworks like React/angular and Vue became standars, cloud services like AWS the same, we adapted and transformed our way of doing things. I think AI is in the same category though in a more impactful way.

Im glad that I took the time off and gave my body and mind time to rest and heal. Im also grateful that I have a job at a company that have supported me unconditionally during the process. Im thankful I get to work at a place where Im motivated and encouraged to try new things and where the support to be at the top of the game is a reality.

Lastly I could not have done this journey from construction to where I am today with out my wife and my family. They are my biggest supporters and I owe them my best!

I automated cherry picking from all my RSS-feeds

Joel del Pilar — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:35:53 +0000

Like many in the tech industry I subscribe on several newsletters that covers the latest and greatest in tech. These days its quiet hard to keep up with everything that is going on, new features, breakthroughs - development is happening in a never seen before speed.

I don't know about you but for me its almost impossible to go through all the newsletters and sort out the articles most interesting. I simply don't have time to open all the emails or visiting all the sites posting the latest in the industry - even if I really want too.

Lets solve the problem

Searching for a simple solution I found n8n automation - yes Im perhaps late in the game on this but anyway.

I fount that you can try n8n for free on Eyevinn Open Source Cloud which is kind of a alternativ to AWS but they uses open source projects as services and shares revenue with the creators.

setup
The setup I made is build on a scheduled trigger which fetches articles from the RSS feeds I read the most from. Then a filter node filters the articles so that I get the latest ones (pub now -1 day) this can be configured to taste, perhaps you'd like news only on a specific day and gather from a week back.

After the filtering is done a "edit fields" node is used to select titles, guid and content from the articles. This is then summarised via a "summarize" node where the values are concatenated and sent to a AI agent node where I'v added my Anthropic account.

The AI is prompted to only select articles that I find related to my work and AI stuff in general. Then it makes a short summarise of the content and creates a list of articles with title, sum and link to the original post.

The articles is then sent to my discord news channel. In this way i narrow down over 200+ articles to about 5-10 articles and they show upp in a platform I use daily. You could also send it to slack or really anywhere!

In this way I automated my news flow, cherry picking only the most relevant and now I have a more manageable way to consume some of the latest news from the industry.

I hope this could inspire you to set up your own workflows! Also try out Open Source Cloud - there is ALOT to try, when Im writing this there is +150 different services available and they also have several use cases posted here.