Articles & Tutorials

Blog

Thoughts, insights and experiences from my work as a software developer.

All (43)

AI & Agents (16)

React (6)

Frontend & Design (5)

APIs & Types (4)

Engineering Culture (6)

Essays & Commentary (6)

Never Meet Your Model

Claude Opus 5 arrived with a chart that put it at the top of the frontier for half the price of Fable 5. Every number on that chart is true. Two weeks of daily use handed me a different model than the one I had assembled from the marketing, which is a story about how models get sold, why the benchmarks stopped measuring what they claim to measure, and what Opus 5 actually is.

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A 1986 Aircraft Manual Fixed My Anti-Slop Skill

Jul 30, 2026

Sascha Becker

A 1986 Aircraft Manual Fixed My Anti-Slop Skill

My anti-slop skill already had rules. They worked, and they were entirely mine, invented from a year of irritation and tested against nothing. Replacing that homemade layer with two writing systems that predate the whole AI era, one written so an aircraft mechanic could not misread a maintenance manual and one that runs the largest documentation estate in software, changed what the skill can do. They also contradict each other, which turned out to be the useful part.

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Jul 21, 2026

Sascha Becker

Sascha - Compacting Experiences

School, apprenticeship, university, first job, my own company: every chapter compacted everything before it into a summary and made room for the new. Then the agentic era arrived, and the metaphor became a way of working. A personal retrospective told in context windows.

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Your Codebase Should Learn From Every Debugging Session

Jul 12, 2026

Sascha Becker

Your Codebase Should Learn From Every Debugging Session

A difficult trace is evidence about how a codebase communicates. The breadcrumbs skill turns that evidence into small repairs: clearer names, explicit contracts, useful errors, honest comments, and documentation in the place readers already look. The result is a codebase that gets easier to understand each time an agent or developer works through it.

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TypeScript 7 Is Not Written in TypeScript

Jul 8, 2026

Sascha Becker

TypeScript 7 Is Not Written in TypeScript

Every post about TypeScript 7 will lead with the same number: ten times faster. The more interesting fact is the one the benchmarks bury. The compiler that checks TypeScript is no longer written in TypeScript. A look at why the team chose Go over Rust, why a port beat a rewrite, what it means that dogfooding lost, and whether you should actually move yet.

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There Is No Such Thing as a Verified Skill: Introducing trust-card

Jun 29, 2026

Sascha Becker

There Is No Such Thing as a Verified Skill: Introducing trust-card

You type one command and a folder you did not write becomes part of how your agent thinks and acts. The only signal you usually get back is a green checkmark, and a checkmark proves the wrong thing. trust-card replaces that badge with graded evidence: who shipped these exact bytes, what the skill is allowed to do, where its knowledge came from, and who has independently vouched for it. It renders the result as a trading-card you can actually read, and it refuses to pretend that a signature proves an artifact is safe.

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Open Design System Format: Hand Your Design System to an Agent

Jun 24, 2026

Sascha Becker

Open Design System Format: Hand Your Design System to an Agent

Coding agents write good UI and bad versions of your UI. The Open Design System Format packages a design system as a bundle of markdown, HTML, and CSS an agent can read and build from: tokens that exist once and render as CSS, typed concepts linked into a graph, and self-rendering examples. It is a strict profile of Google's Open Knowledge Format. Here is what it is and the odsf skill I shipped with it.

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Open Knowledge Format: Just Markdown Your Agent Can Read

Jun 18, 2026

Sascha Becker

Open Knowledge Format: Just Markdown Your Agent Can Read

Google's Open Knowledge Format is a tiny, vendor-neutral spec for the context an AI agent needs: a bundle of markdown files with YAML frontmatter, one required field per concept, no SDK and no lock-in. Here is what it is, why the permissive consumer contract is the clever part, and what I shipped on top of it: the okf skill, a bundle collection, and OKF Viewer, a desktop app that reads any bundle as a graph.

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Ticket Smells: How to Spot a Bad Slice Before You Pull It

Jun 18, 2026

Sascha Becker

Ticket Smells: How to Spot a Bad Slice Before You Pull It

A bad ticket rarely announces itself. It looks fine in refinement, earns a confident estimate, and then detonates at the end of the sprint: twice the work, a hidden dependency, or a description only its author can decode. The fix is not heroics. It is learning to smell the rot early, the way you already smell a code smell. Here are the four ticket smells that cost teams the most, the research on why they hurt, and a checklist your team can run before anything reaches the board.

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Eww, That Stinks! Introducing react-stinky

Jun 16, 2026

Sascha Becker

Eww, That Stinks! Introducing react-stinky

A code smell is the React equivalent of milk that turned over the weekend: it still pours, but something is off. react-stinky is an agent skill that walks your whole component, hook, or module, names the cost of each smell, proposes a concrete fix with a source link, and (the part that makes it usable) knows when to keep its mouth shut. Here is what it sniffs for, how it rates the funk, and why the list of things it refuses to flag matters more than the list of things it does.

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