Tag: Development

If you’re using tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot Workspace, or similar, you’ve probably noticed there’s technical jargon that goes beyond simply “chatting with AI”. I’m talking about terms like rules, commands, skills, MCP, and hooks.

These concepts are the architecture that makes AI agents truly useful for software development. They’re not just fancy marketing words — each one serves a specific function in how the agent works.

Let’s break them down one by one in a clear way.

Lately I’ve been following a discussion that worries me quite a bit: to what extent are we delegating our thinking to AI. It’s not an abstract or philosophical question, it’s something very real I’m seeing day to day in our profession and in society in general.

Recently I read an article by Erik Johannes Husom titled “Outsourcing thinking” that, among other things, discusses the concept of “lump of cognition fallacy”. The idea is that, just as there’s an economic fallacy saying there’s a fixed amount of work to do, some believe there’s a fixed amount of thinking to do, and if machines think for us, we’ll just think about other things.

A few days ago I read an article by Dominiek about the 5 principles for using AI professionally and found myself constantly nodding. After years of watching technologies arrive and evolve, AI gives me the same feelings I had with other “revolutions”: enthusiasm mixed with a necessary dose of skepticism.

Dominiek’s article especially resonated with me because it perfectly describes what we’re experiencing: a world where AI is getting into everything, but not always in the most useful or sensible way.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen many things change. I’ve gone from Borland to Visual Studio, from vi to Sublime Text, from Sublime to VS Code… And believe me, each change was a deliberate decision that cost me weeks of adaptation. But what’s happening now with AI tools is something completely different.

I’ve found myself using Copilot in the morning, trying Cursor in the afternoon, and checking out Claude Code before going to bed. And I’m not alone. Developers have gone from being faithful as dogs to our tools to being… well, promiscuous.

Trabajando en proyectos grandes, es habitual tener suites de tests que pueden tardar varios minutos en ejecutarse. Y cuando uno de esos tests falla al principio de la ejecución, es frustrante esperar a que todos los demás se ejecuten para ver el resultado completo.

Jest incluye una funcionalidad que he encontrado muy útil en desarrollo: la opción bail, que permite parar la ejecución de tests después de un número determinado de fallos. Es una de esas características que una vez la conoces y empiezas a usar, no entiendes cómo has vivido sin ella.

When working on large projects, it’s common to have test suites that can take several minutes to run. And when one of those tests fails early in the execution, it’s frustrating to wait for all the others to complete just to see the full results.

Jest includes a feature I’ve found very useful in development: the bail option, which allows stopping test execution after a certain number of failures. It’s one of those features that once you know and start using, you don’t understand how you lived without it.

In my years developing software, I’ve learned that the best tools are those that eliminate unnecessary friction. And LM Studio has just taken a huge step in that direction: it’s now completely free for enterprise use.

This may sound like “just another AI news item,” but for those of us who have been experimenting with local models for a while, this is an important paradigm shift.

The problem that existed before

Since its launch in May 2023, LM Studio was always free for personal use. But if you wanted to use it in your company, you had to contact them to obtain a commercial license. This created exactly the type of friction that kills team experimentation.

In my experience with mobile development, I’ve seen how apps become increasingly complex and projects grow uncontrollably. I remember perfectly that feeling of having thousands of lines of code and not being sure what was really being used and what wasn’t.

That’s why I was so struck by the tool that Sentry (formerly from Emerge Tools) just released as open source: Reaper. An SDK that does something that sounds simple but is tremendously useful: find dead code in your mobile applications.

A few years ago, many AI researchers (even the most reputable) predicted that prompt engineering would be a temporary skill that would quickly disappear. They were completely wrong. Not only has it not disappeared, but it has evolved into something much more sophisticated: Context Engineering.

And no, it’s not just another buzzword. It’s a natural evolution that reflects the real complexity of working with LLMs in production applications.

From prompt engineering to context engineering

The problem with the term “prompt engineering” is that many people confuse it with blind prompting - simply writing a question in ChatGPT and expecting a result. That’s not engineering, that’s using a tool.

Deno 2.4 has just been released, and I must admit it has pleasantly surprised me. Not only because of the number of new features, but because of one in particular that many of us thought would never return: deno bundle is back. And this time, it’s here to stay.

This release comes packed with improvements ranging from importing text files directly to stable observability with OpenTelemetry. Let’s explore what this release brings us.

I’ve seen how certain standards and tools become indispensable when working with data. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over these years, it’s that JSON is everywhere: APIs, logs, configurations, NoSQL databases… The question is no longer whether you’ll work with JSON, but when you’ll face that 15-level nested structure that makes you sigh.

The Problem We’ve All Lived Through

How many times have you had to write something like this?

The first alpha version of PHP 8.5 has just been released, and I must confess it has me more excited than recent versions. It’s not just for the technical improvements (which are many), but because PHP 8.5 introduces features that will change the way we write code.

And when I say “change,” I mean the kind of changes that, once you use them, you can’t go back. Like when the null coalescing operator (??) appeared in PHP 7, or arrow functions in PHP 7.4.