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Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)

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🔥 All about software design, development, and culture. A mix of insightful and funny. Goes great with coffee. ☕

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Prompt For Progress

Me just asking DeepSeek to make my app go faster, to which it replies with:

The cumulative effect across all the changes so far: the list page went from 6 DB queries to 4 (removed merchants + cached rates + cached account), and the edit page went from loading all expenses to

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Weekend Reading — The least you can do

Weekend Reading — The least you can do

a brief history of consumption


This week I completed developing the expense report app. This is the software that I am working on for getting all my tax stuff together – receipts, mileage and what not. This is made using Deepseek V4 Flash and the total cost of the project

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Expense — receipt tracking for easier tax filing

Expense — receipt tracking for easier tax filing

$9.20 to vibe-code an app into existence in one week. It's made of 38,000 lines of code and 15,700 lines of comments. Tests make up about 21% of the code. Spec size is about 3,200 words.

I understand that "vibe

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Weekend Reading — The elderly health category

Weekend Reading — The elderly health category

Pixelcats "Opened the mail .. Derpy arrived early! SQUEE!"


Did I just vibe-code an app because I didn’t like the new UI? Why yes I did. I’ve been using Expensify for many years to keep track of my expenses. It was good. There were

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The Art of War, Applied to Litigation

I have an AI agent that helps me handle legal cases. It's not a lawyer, but I can iterate with it for hours on different scenarios, work on collecting evidence, ask clarifying questions, etc. It charges me an hourly rate of $1.20, so 100x cheaper than an

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Weekend Reading — Industrial complex

Laura


Tech Stuff

MacPaw releases CleanMyMac CLI for cleaning developer and AI environments on macOS I love that it's a CLI, super easy to use, and cleans up your developer caches, build artifacts, and AI coding junk. brew install cleanmymac

Writing & Editing Stack Using Zed, Harper, Vale

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Weekend Reading — I am so far behind on my procrastination

Cat "Jeez, would you look at the time?"


Tech Stuff

InkLeaf Foldable screen, but not a phone — an e-Ink tablet on which you can read and write. Stylus included.

SCR-20260718-rwnb.png

In defense of not understanding your codebase

That’s why many engineers take up open-source

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Weekend Reading — I’m bringing .exe back

Weekend Reading — I’m bringing .exe back

David Phd "The British are adding panels to the Bayeux Tapestry while its in London"


Tech Stuff

Chatto is now Open Source!

Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using. You’re probably familiar with the one that rhymes with “knack&

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Weekend Reading — Hydrate like a data center

Shawn "Fruan" Poulsen "Thirst trap"


Tech Stuff

SmoothCSV CSV editor without the Excel overhead. Features include smooth cell editing, SQL queries, cell and row swapping, command palette, and more. Since it's a Tauri app, minimal memory usage and super smooth UI.

Wordgard Open-source

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Weekend Reading — It's gettin' hot in here …

Tjeerd Royaards "Hot. Cartoon from last year."


Tech Stuff

DevCleaner Free space on your Mac that's currently used by the caches of Xcode, npm, Cursor, Claude, et al. Runs local, minimum memory footprint, and there's a free version.

Cotypist Text auto-complete that runs

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Weekend Reading — A sourdough finisher

Weekend Reading — A sourdough finisher

CrankGPT The human-powered, local-first, private AI.


Tech Stuff

Lettera Based on Bear's remarkable Markdown editor, a standalone app for editing Markdown files from your file system. I like Bear's Markdown editing, so I think Lettera is an interesting idea. Currently beta release, so no

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Weekend Reading — Future-proofed like there’s no tomorrow!

Weekend Reading — Future-proofed like there’s no tomorrow!

Neil "Just because you can...."


Tech Stuff

OfficeCLI A CLI to help AI create/read/edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Open source and doesn't require a Microsoft Office license. I just installed this for the benefit of my 3 AI agents that have to deal

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Weekend Reading — Little Bobby ignore all previous instructions

Frechrotz_Pix 'Lego- bzw. Klemmbausteine'


Tech Stuff

pitchfork A devilishly good daemons manager: start/stop daemon, automatic restarts, health checks, file watching, cron scheduling, and many more useful features.

Greg Wilson

OH: "Their version of agile is, we can keep changing our mind until it's

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I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It

I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It

So here's the thing. When a company loses a class action lawsuit and has to pay millions to regular people, they don't just write you a check. They go out of their way to make sure you never actually get to spend your cut. I'

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Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours

Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours

geekysteven


Tech Stuff

Zed I really like using Cursor but it's a huge IDE (basically VS Code) which takes forever to load and eats up too much memory and sometimes I have to restart it just to fix a broken extension. I started using Zed for the occasional

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Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am

Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am

Natasha "Fragile Handle With Care" by Roman Pankoy (2020) Oil on canvas


Tech Stuff

Animata A collection of React + Tailwind animations and effects to enhance your UI. A pretty substantive collection of animated elements. You'll likely find a few for the marketing website, a handful that

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Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming

Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming

Sophie Schmieg "Work moved to a new building. I didn't expect to take SAN damage from facilities."


Tech Stuff

Magic Notebook A free app, simple and elegant UI, no cloud sync, just open a folder and get working. Can handle DOCX, Markdown and text files. I

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coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware

coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware

Introducing coolify-deploy — git push to your own server with the simplicity of a platform.

I used to host everything on Vercel and honestly it was great. Connect a repo, push, your app is live — simple enough that it spoils you fast.

When I outgrew the free tier I

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Weekend Reading — Locally hosted torment nexus

Weekend Reading — Locally hosted torment nexus

John "Posted today by Lego on their official Instagram account. Well done, Lego, well done. 😁"


Tech Stuff

portless HTTPS for npm dev using .localhost URLs instead of port numbers:

Portless runs an HTTPS reverse proxy on port 443 by default. Each app registers a route mapping its

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Weekend Reading — The background noise of the AI bubble

Weekend Reading — The background noise of the AI bubble

Fake Metro Trains "Due to ongoing delays with the delivery of our new Xtrapolis 2.0 trains, we've implemented some temporary measures to keep our network running."


Tech Stuff

What's actually new in JavaScript (and what's coming next) This is a helpful

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Weekend Reading — Dream of bigger things

Weekend Reading — Dream of bigger things

GeriAQuin


Tech Stuff

Tolaria I just added this app this to my repertoire. I didn't get a chance to use it much yet, but it looks interesting — build a knowledge you can share with your AI that's version controlled and doesn't require an

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Weekend Reading — Penguin drama

Niki "Most useless sign in the universe"


Tech Stuff

ShowMD The Markdown space is heating up 🔥 Today I installed a Markdown editor (Scratch), upgraded my Markdown viewer (mud), and setup this Markdown QuickLook previewer (ShowMD).

erictli/scratch Minimalist, offline-first markdown note-taking app for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

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Weekend Reading — Look Away

Weekend Reading — Look Away

Someone Turned an Old Ford Van Into a Mini Semi and It’s Fantastic


Tech Stuff

LookAway This is one app I have to run on my Mac. It forces me to take a break every 45 minutes — not a Pomodoro break (which I never got the hang

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Weekend Reading — For entertainment purposes only

Weekend Reading — For entertainment purposes only

Natasha "Perfect for Easter, EGGO is a two piece construction toy"


Tech Stuff

PopTask As a concept I find this super interesting — a task list that lives in the menu bar and understands human inputs like "evry tue thu 7 30 n sat mrng". Supports

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Weekend Reading — The paperwork flood

Holeintheheadesign


Tech Stuff

HopTab Open source app switcher and tiler to replace Cmd+Tab. If you Cmd+Tab a lot you may find this app quite useful.

Number, currency, and unit formatting

Did you know that the mathematical value 1234.56 looks different in Boston, Berlin, and Bangalore? Hardcoding formats

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Weekend Reading — First roll back, then debug

Weekend Reading — First roll back, then debug

Lady Laura "Pack of Dogs by John Littleboy"


Tech Stuff

Infisical I'm trying this service as a replacement for Doppler. Seems to have more capabilities plus it's an open-source project you can self-host (if you so care). Does feel overwhelming at first with all

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Weekend Reading — Happy π day!

Weekend Reading — Happy π day!

Mina "It's PiDay!"


Tech Stuff

How to Do Code Reviews in the Agentic Era I've been working on open-source for over 25 years, I suspect that's why I accept The LLM as just another project contributor:

My “unpopular” take: I

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Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt

Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt

cliff538 "What a great artistic reuse of old license plates!"


Tech Stuff

Shepherd "Stay focused. Grow your sheep." Chrome extension that auto-categorizes thousands of sites as productive, neutral, or distracting—keep using productive sites and watch your sheep grow. If Pomodoro timer did nothing for

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Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads

Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads

ConnectionWithWonder "Knitted bollard-warmer Weymouth"


Tech Stuff

UNF* Records every version of a file and can easily rewind back without having to manually commit changes. Perfect if you're working with AI agents and don't trust them. Also perfect if you're just prone to

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Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards

Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards

Marcel "It's embarrassing how quickly a bit of sunshine can change my mood."


Tech Stuff

Current is a new RSS reader that’s more like a river than an inbox If you want to enjoy RSS give Current a try. $9.99 as a one-time