Vincent Schmalbach

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

Testing Statamic Addons This guide shows you how to test Statamic addons effectively. Testing addons is different from testing regular PHP packages because they depend on Statamic’s core functionality, which often requires...

Testing Statamic Addons: This guide shows you how to test Statamic addons effectively. Testing addons is different from testing regular PHP packages because they depend on Sta

Building Custom UIs with AJAX in Statamic Addons Creating custom UI components in Statamic addons with AJAX functionality is poorly documented, making it frustrating to implement. This guide shows you exactly how to build Vue components…

Building Custom UIs with AJAX in Statamic Addons: Creating custom UI components in Statamic addons with AJAX functionality is poorly documented, making it frustrating to implement. This guide shows yo

Creating Statamic Addons This guide walks you through creating a Statamic addon from scratch. We’ll build a real addon that adds functionality to your Statamic installation. By the end of this guide, you’ll have: Use Statamic’…

Creating Statamic Addons: This guide walks you through creating a Statamic addon from scratch. We'll build a real addon that adds functionality to your Statamic installation.
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My LLMs Have Personalities and I Can’t Unsee It Spending 8+ hours a day with AI assistants does things to you. Time to share my completely scientific personality assessments. GPT-3.5 was revolutionary when it arrived. Unlike its predecessor GPT-3…

My LLMs Have Personalities and I Can’t Unsee It: Spending 8+ hours a day with AI assistants does things to you. Time to share my completely scientific personality assessments.
GPT-3.5: The Chatterbox

Fixing Cursor IDE High GPU Usage and UI Freezing Issues Cursor IDE users on Windows 10 with WSL2 and Linux systems have been experiencing significant performance problems that make the editor nearly unusable. Here’s how to fix them. High GPU Usage (Windows…

Fixing Cursor IDE High GPU Usage and UI Freezing Issues: Cursor IDE users on Windows 10 with WSL2 and Linux systems have been experiencing significant performance problems that make the editor nearly unusabl