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Tag · 19 essays

Developer experience

Writing tagged "Developer experience".

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Buy the plumbing, vibe the rest

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.

  • Composable architecture
  • AI engineering
  • Frontend
  • Developer experience

The Doer Economy - we are killing the translator class

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.

  • Composable architecture
  • AI engineering
  • API design
  • Frontend

The tool catalog is the product

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.

  • AI engineering
  • API design
  • Developer experience

The case for boring setups

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.

  • Composable architecture
  • AI engineering
  • Cloud & infra
  • Frontend

The future of software is bespoke

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.

  • Composable architecture
  • CMS
  • API design
  • Frontend