Sascha Becker

Sascha Becker

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

Open Knowledge Format: Just Markdown Your Agent Can Read
Latest Article
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 the okf skill and bundle collection I shipped on top of it.

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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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Same Same but Different: The Anatomy of AI Design Sameness
Jun 12, 2026
Sascha Becker

Same Same but Different: The Anatomy of AI Design Sameness

Hand an agent your art direction and it still builds the page everyone else got. That is not a taste problem, it is a statistics problem. A look at the history of design convergence, the research that explains why prompts cannot escape it, and the levers that actually steer back toward identity.

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Autopilot: Claude as a Self-Directed Intern
May 31, 2026
Sascha Becker

Autopilot: Claude as a Self-Directed Intern

Most of the time you spend with an AI coding agent, you are the bottleneck: it does one thing, then stops and waits for you. Autopilot is a skill that takes you out of that seat. The agent picks the work, does it, verifies it, commits it, and picks the next thing, while you review the stream of commits on your own schedule. Here is how it works, why it is safe to leave running, and why it does not just bury you in busywork.

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A web app that thinks it's a desktop
May 28, 2026
Sascha Becker

A web app that thinks it's a desktop

What changes in a React app when you stop treating it like a webpage and start treating it like a desktop environment: windows, a dock, a shared 3D canvas.

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The Flight Protocol Made Your DoS My Problem
May 19, 2026
Sascha Becker

The Flight Protocol Made Your DoS My Problem

On May 6, 2026, React and Next.js patched twelve vulnerabilities. One of them, CVE-2026-23870, is a single HTTP request that pins your Node process. The bug isn't the bug. The bug is that the framework boundary was a network boundary all along.

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The pull_request_target Trap
May 12, 2026
Sascha Becker

The pull_request_target Trap

How a known-dangerous GitHub Actions pattern keeps compromising npm packages. The TanStack incident, the prior cases, and the checklist that actually prevents it.

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Questions Before Pixels
May 11, 2026
Sascha Becker

Questions Before Pixels

A short handbook for UX in 2026. The bar for "looks good" is now zero. The work that's left is the questioning, before any pixel is drawn.

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Six Models, One React Stack: Why Every LLM Builds the Same App
May 4, 2026
Sascha Becker

Six Models, One React Stack: Why Every LLM Builds the Same App

Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, v0, Lovable, Bolt. Ask any of them to build a React app and you get the same answer: Next.js or Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn/ui. A look at the convergence, why it's happening, what we lose, and how to steer your way out of it.

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