Vincent Schmalbach

How Codex CLI Flags Actually Work (Full-Auto, Sandbox, and Bypass) If you use the Codex CLI, you’ve probably seen a few flags that look like they do the same thing: , , and . They’re related, but they are not interchangeable. Controls the filesystem + network sandbox…

How Codex CLI Flags Actually Work (Full-Auto, Sandbox, and Bypass): If you use the Codex CLI, you’ve probably seen a few flags that look like they do the same thing: --full-auto, --sandbox, and --dangerously-bypass-app

AI in the Mining Industry Mining is currently executing a massive pivot from manual, labor-intensive extraction to a model driven by data and automation. This is a fundamental shift in how resources are found, extracted…

AI in the Mining Industry: Mining is currently executing a massive pivot from manual, labor-intensive extraction to a model driven by data and automation. This is a fundamental

Making Money From What You Care About There’s this idea floating around that if you’re top 1% at anything, you’ll make money. It sounds nice but it’s not quite true. What is true: being exceptional creates options. It doesn’t guarantee…

Making Money From What You Care About: There's this idea floating around that if you're top 1% at anything, you'll make money. It sounds nice but it's not quite true. What is true: being ex

Speeding Up Laravel Tests with tmpfs (MySQL in RAM) If your Laravel test suite is painfully slow and does a lot of database work (multi-tenancy, migrations, seeding), the bottleneck is almost certainly disk I/O. Not CPU, not PHP, not Docker overhead.

Speeding Up Laravel Tests with tmpfs (MySQL in RAM): If your Laravel test suite is painfully slow and does a lot of database work (multi-tenancy, migrations, seeding), the bottleneck is almost certainly

Rent a Mac M4 Mini and Access It via SSH from Linux I needed a Mac to run a Laravel test suite. On my ThinkPad T15g with Docker, the tests took so long I gave up after 2 hours. My client said it takes 5 minutes on their M4 Mac. I decided to rent one…

Rent a Mac M4 Mini and Access It via SSH from Linux: I needed a Mac to run a Laravel test suite. On my ThinkPad T15g with Docker, the tests took so long I gave up after 2 hours. My client said it takes 5

AI Exponentializes Your Tech Debt If you have tech debt, you’re now exponentially worse off, because you can’t leverage the massive productivity gains that AI offers, while your competitors with clean codebases are moving faster.

AI Exponentializes Your Tech Debt: If you have tech debt, you're now exponentially worse off, because you can't leverage the massive productivity gains that AI offers, while your compet

Claude Code Uses Your API Key Over Your Subscription, Even When You’re Logged In If you have both a Claude subscription (Pro/Max) and an environment variable set, Claude Code will use the API key and bill you at pay-as-you-go rates instead of using your subscription.

Claude Code Uses Your API Key Over Your Subscription, Even When You’re Logged In: If you have both a Claude subscription (Pro/Max) and an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable set, Claude Code will use the API key and bill you at p

Migrate Claude Code Sessions to a New Computer Moving to a new computer or switching from WSL to native Linux? Here’s how to preserve all your Claude Code conversation history and make it accessible on your new setup. After copying your folder to…

Migrate Claude Code Sessions to a New Computer: Moving to a new computer or switching from WSL to native Linux? Here's how to preserve all your Claude Code conversation history and make it accessibl

Breaking Out of the Codex Sandbox (While Keeping Approval Controls) If you’re using OpenAI’s Codex CLI, you might want it to work like Claude Code does by default: able to run powerful commands, but asking for your approval first. Codex CLI has a safety feature called…

Breaking Out of the Codex Sandbox (While Keeping Approval Controls): If you're using OpenAI's Codex CLI, you might want it to work like Claude Code does by default: able to run powerful commands, but asking for your app

AI is Changing Jobs. Who Benefits? Everyone’s talking about AI replacing jobs. The robots are coming for our work, right? But if you look at what’s actually happening in companies right now, the story is more complicated and honestly…

AI is Changing Jobs. Who Benefits?: Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs. The robots are coming for our work, right? But if you look at what's actually happening in companies right

Configuring Claude Code for Privacy and Noise Control If you’re using Claude Code for development work, you might want to minimize telemetry, disable promotional messages, and keep your Git history clean. Here’s how to configure Claude Code for maximum…

Configuring Claude Code for Privacy and Noise Control: If you're using Claude Code for development work, you might want to minimize telemetry, disable promotional messages, and keep your Git history clean.

AI is Dumber on Mondays It’s Monday morning. My coffee is hot, my IDE is open, and Claude Code just suggested I fix a bug by… creating the exact same bug in a different file. Cursor is hallucinating function names that don’t…

AI is Dumber on Mondays: It's Monday morning. My coffee is hot, my IDE is open, and Claude Code just suggested I fix a bug by... creating the exact same bug in a different fil

Who will feed AI when traffic dies? Most searches now end without a single click to an actual website. AI companies are training their models on publisher content while destroying the traffic that funded creating that content in the…

Who will feed AI when traffic dies?: Most searches now end without a single click to an actual website. AI companies are training their models on publisher content while destroying the tr

Software Development Costs: Why AI Hasn’t Changed Prices Everyone keeps asking if AI tools are making software development cheaper. The short answer is no. The long answer is more interesting. I’ve been building software for over two decades…

Software Development Costs: Why AI Hasn’t Changed Prices: Everyone keeps asking if AI tools are making software development cheaper. The short answer is no. The long answer is more interesting.
I've been buil

Untitled My Lenovo ThinkPad T15g Gen 2 becomes almost unusable when connecting an external 4K monitor after the laptop has already booted. The cursor stutters, windows take seconds to respond…

: ThinkPad External Monitor Lag: The Hybrid Graphics Problem
My Lenovo ThinkPad T15g Gen 2 becomes almost unusable when connecting an external 4K monito

Claude Code is Having Its Cursor Moment Remember a few months ago when Cursor launched their $200/month plan? They marketed it as essentially unlimited usage with "20x more than Pro." Users burned through their limits in hours…

Claude Code is Having Its Cursor Moment: Remember a few months ago when Cursor launched their $200/month plan? They marketed it as essentially unlimited usage with "20x more than Pro." Users

AI is the new social media I was working on a blog post about how AI would eventually replace social media when OpenAI just… did it. They launched Sora 2 on September 30th with an iOS app that’s basically TikTok, except 100%

AI is the new social media: I was working on a blog post about how AI would eventually replace social media when OpenAI just... did it. They launched Sora 2 on September 30th wit

Laravel’s $touches Property: Automatic Parent Timestamp Updates Laravel’s property automatically updates parent model timestamps when child models are modified. When any instance is created, updated, or deleted, Laravel automatically updates the timestamp of its…

Laravel’s $touches Property: Automatic Parent Timestamp Updates: Laravel's $touches property automatically updates parent model timestamps when child models are modified.
Basic Usage
class Comment extends Model
{
p

Creating PDFs with Chart.js charts in Laravel using wkhtmltopdf Rendering Chart.js charts into PDFs with wkhtmltopdf can be surprisingly tricky. wkhtmltopdf uses QtWebKit (an older browser engine), while Chart.js draws on an HTML5 canvas and often assumes modern…

Creating PDFs with Chart.js charts in Laravel using wkhtmltopdf: Rendering Chart.js charts into PDFs with wkhtmltopdf can be surprisingly tricky. wkhtmltopdf uses QtWebKit (an older browser engine), while Chart.js d www.vincentschmalbach.com/creating-pdf...

Only Experts Can Write Good Prompts Everyone talks about prompt engineering as if memorizing templates and adding "think step by step" will suddenly get you amazing AI results. That’s not how it works. Writing good prompts isn’t about…

Only Experts Can Write Good Prompts: Everyone talks about prompt engineering as if memorizing templates and adding "think step by step" will suddenly get you amazing AI results. That's no

ETFs Are Inflating the Everything Bubble Stock prices are at all-time highs and traditional valuation metrics like P/E ratios are largely ignored. At the same time, passive investing through ETF index funds has become the default advice: buy…

ETFs Are Inflating the Everything Bubble: Stock prices are at all-time highs and traditional valuation metrics like P/E ratios are largely ignored. At the same time, passive investing through

GPT-5 is the best coding model in the world (biggest leap since 3.5 Sonnet) GPT-5 doesn’t just write code; it thinks like an engineer. When faced with complex dependency conflicts that stumped previous models, GPT-5 takes a methodical approach: investigating systematically…

GPT-5 is the best coding model in the world (biggest leap since 3.5 Sonnet): GPT-5 doesn't just write code; it thinks like an engineer. When faced with complex dependency conflicts that stumped previous models, GPT-5 takes a me

Laravel Factories In Laravel, a Factory is a class dedicated to generating instances of your Eloquent models. They solve a fundamental problem: your application needs data to function, especially during testing and…

Laravel Factories: In Laravel, a Factory is a class dedicated to generating instances of your Eloquent models. They solve a fundamental problem: your application needs d

How to Limit WSL2 Resource Usage with .wslconfig The WSL2 virtual machine ( process) can consume a significant amount of system memory and CPU. You can set resource limits by creating a file in your Windows user profile. Open the Windows File…

How to Limit WSL2 Resource Usage with .wslconfig: The WSL2 virtual machine (Vmmem process) can consume a significant amount of system memory and CPU. You can set resource limits by creating a .wslconf

Is Docker Making Your Computer Slow? Here Is How to Find the Problem Does your computer fan get loud when you run Docker or your system becomes sluggish? Usually, the problem is not Docker itself, but a process inside one of your containers that is using too many…

Is Docker Making Your Computer Slow? Here Is How to Find the Problem: Does your computer fan get loud when you run Docker or your system becomes sluggish? Usually, the problem is not Docker itself, but a process inside o

Fix Insane Disk I/O in Laravel Sail: Disable MySQL Binary Logs Is your Docker-based development environment sluggish? Do your fans spin up for no reason? If you run , do you see your MySQL container writing gigabytes of data under the column? If so…

Fix Insane Disk I/O in Laravel Sail: Disable MySQL Binary Logs: Is your Docker-based development environment sluggish? Do your fans spin up for no reason? If you run docker stats, do you see your MySQL container wr

Stop Using git checkout Git 2.23 introduced two commands that replace the two different jobs used to do: Use these instead of for clarity and safety. tried to do both “move to another branch” and “change files.

Stop Using git checkout: Git 2.23 introduced two commands that replace the two different jobs git checkout used to do:

- git switch — change or create branches
- git restore

Quickly Restore All Deleted Files in Git If you’ve accidentally deleted multiple tracked files in your Git repository, you can bring them all back at once using this simple command: All deleted files will be restored to their previous state…

Quickly Restore All Deleted Files in Git: If you’ve accidentally deleted multiple tracked files in your Git repository, you can bring them all back at once using this simple command:
git resto

Do Not Use Laravel Cache Tags (And What You Should Use Instead) Laravel’s cache tags feature only works with Redis and Memcached. Using it with other cache drivers (file, database, DynamoDB, array) will throw exceptions. This creates problems when switching…

Do Not Use Laravel Cache Tags (And What You Should Use Instead): Laravel's cache tags feature only works with Redis and Memcached. Using it with other cache drivers (file, database, DynamoDB, array) will throw excep www.vincentschmalbach.com/do-not-use-l...

Rendering Bard Content to HTML in Statamic When working with Statamic’s Bard fieldtype programmatically, you’ll often need to convert its structured data to HTML. The documentation doesn’t make this obvious, but here’s how to do it properly.

Rendering Bard Content to HTML in Statamic: When working with Statamic's Bard fieldtype programmatically, you'll often need to convert its structured data to HTML. The documentation doesn't make