I've shared past experiences with vibe coding and it's been a fascinating way to experiment and build on a small scale, but while it works well for POCs and other small utilities (I won't say 'toys' as I've built useful, if small, things now multiple times), it isn't really a "process" and not one that would work over a project with a longer time frame. This is where "Agentic Development" comes in. It's not always referred to as such and it's a huge topic, but let me give you my opinion on it and then demonstrate how I used it to build my newest project, I Watch Watches.
Earlier today and in a non web-related conversation, I saw someone talk about copying tabular data into different formats, like plain text and CSV. It got me thinking - this could be a useful feature for web sites and surely something pretty trivial to do in JavaScript. So I whipped up a quick demo.
Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see.
A few days ago I was chatting with Chuck Meyer (devrel for Algolia) and I casually mentioned, "It sure would be cool if Algolia had an easy way to turn my search index into an MCP server." He promptly responded, "Of course, you complete and utter dufus, which is why we already have that feature." (Not an exact quote.) This is exactly the kind of thing I love to hear. I've been using Algolia for my search here for years and honestly have not paid much attention to the new additions on their platform. That was a mistake. Let me show you how dang easy they made this.
Yesterday, I wrote about using Cursor to review my blog for performance. Cursor (and again, for full disclosure I work here now ;) did a dang good job of finding performance issues with my site, handling the huge size and various languages, platforms, and so forth. As I said, it worked well, but I wanted to look into making this more of a repeatable process.
Last week I decided to try something interesting. I opened my blog up in Cursor and asked for a basic performance review. That seems like a no-brainer, but keep in mind, my blog's source code clocks in at near seven thousand files (ignoring node_modules of course), so this wasn't some small request.
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