Tag · 21 essays
Writing tagged "Developer experience".
At ContentCon, I realised building tools for yourself still feels unfamiliar to many developers. Coding agents help, but finding a starting point matters too.
How the new MCP Skills Extension works, from skill discovery and on-demand loading to content verification, workflow guidance, and managed profiles.
AI makes it tempting to cancel SaaS tools and prompt your own internal platforms into existence, but that often creates brittle systems that are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Performance, security, and edge cases quickly become serious problems, and suddenly your team is doing database administration and security engineering instead of solving business problems. A better pattern is to buy robust, headless infrastructure for the hard, invisible parts (content, data, security, scaling) and then use AI to build bespoke experiences on top. With a solid SDK and stable backend services, AI tools like Claude can safely orchestrate UI and workflows instead of guessing at architecture. Pay for the plumbing, and vibe on the interface layer where your differentiation really lives.
This article argues that AI is collapsing the distance between vision and execution, ushering in a Doer Economy where the primary winners are those who can both imagine and build. The traditional corporate stack of translators (product managers, marketers, and multiple layers of management) is shrinking because executional tasks are increasingly handled by AI. Founders and CEOs are moving closer to product, validating ideas directly with AI-generated scaffolds and modern SaaS primitives. For individuals, the value has shifted from narrow, ticket-driven skills to end-to-end ownership, product thinking, and understanding users. The future belongs to people who ship, iterate quickly, and leverage AI and SaaS platforms to focus on business logic and user experience, rather than those who only manage the builders.
Contentstack just made Agent OS generally available, renamed the platform to AXP, and shipped a pile of developer tooling. I helped build the AI side, and I am happily biased about why this one is different.
We exposed Contentstack MCP tool definitions through a server endpoint as JSON. That sounds small, but it changes the product shape. The hosted MCP server becomes one official implementation of a reusable tool catalog, while developers can build their own MCPs with their own auth, hosting, filtering, and governance. This is what AI-first developer tooling should feel like: polished defaults on top of portable primitives.
When folks think they're failing at AI coding, they're usually failing at their laptop. Before you brief an agent well, your machine has to be a predictable place.
Most developers overconfigure their machines and pay for it in ways they don't notice. Every custom alias, every remapped key, every hand-rolled config file is a small tax on your ability to work anywhere other than your own laptop. The same pattern is repeating right now with AI tooling, dozens of MCP servers and stacked skill files that look like leverage and behave like drag. After getting stranded by my own setups more times than I'd like to admit, I've come around to a quieter belief: portability is a skill, and defaults are how you practice it.
The AI builds what you describe, not what you need in production. This guide covers the full architecture stack for vibe-coded apps - auth, database security, secrets, GDPR, audit logging, rate limiting, and dependencies - so you can ship fast and stay solid.
This article argues that generic SaaS dashboards are a legacy compromise from a time when custom software was expensive and slow to build. With modern APIs, solid SDKs, scaffolding, and AI-assisted development, teams can now create focused, bespoke interfaces in days that match their exact workflows, instead of fighting through one-size-fits-all UIs. The platform should be treated as the engine providing authentication, permissions, content modeling, and governance, while product teams own the experience layer tailored to their people. The piece also examines trade-offs like maintenance burden, skills gaps, and fragility, and explains how good scaffolding, community patterns, and developer education can mitigate these risks and make custom tooling a pragmatic default.
I gave OpenAI Codex a management token, an API key, some YouTube IDs, and my Contentstack TypeScript schema. It imported all my content flawlessly, then wrote a custom CLI and a skill to do it again. I did not ask it to do that. Now I'm wondering if we've been overcomplicating everything.
For the last year, the dominant narrative has been that AI will replace developers. I think that narrative has it backwards. AI doesn't replace developers - it raises the bar for everyone else to justify their seat next to someone who can now ship at absurd velocity.
With good APIs and OpenAPI specs, AI agents can generate production-ready clients in seconds. This challenges everything we know about SDK development and distribution. But are we ready to let go?
When the market stops buying, vanity metrics stop mattering. Here's how to measure DevRel impact in ways that executives understand and that correlate with real business outcomes like ARR growth.
The promise of AI-powered development is seductive, but here's the reality check nobody's talking about - the better you understand code, the better your AI-generated results will be. LLMs code like humans with high IQs and unstoppable work ethic. Treat them as junior developers and learn the fundamentals to multiply your vibe coding power.
I released my Cursor rules and commands as a public repo because Cursor is not magic, it is leverage. By turning it into a constrained system with explicit rules, reusable commands, and real project context, you can make it behave like a senior engineer on SaaS projects. The real win is not speed, but trust at speed.
MCP servers shouldn't just expose endpoints, they should adapt to their environment, using project context to guide AI reasoning and execution.
Universal CMS reshapes CMS by blending headless and traditional, empowering developers and content creators. But are we reinventing the wheel here?
This post explores two main types of visual editors platform-first and code-first. I compare their functionalities, pros, and cons to help you choose the right solution for your development needs.
If you have used a webcam before you know what it means to look like shit on camera. Even the most...
Build it yourself or use Cloudinary Dynamic video streaming is a video delivery technique...