Thilo Maier

Managing environment variables with Vercel How to manage environment variables in Vercel for any project and environment, and easily sync them to your local .env file.

You can use Vercel to manage the secrets that go into you local `.env` file.

www.maier.tech/posts/managi...

I have never heard of Open Launch.

What are its advantages compared to ProductHunt or other platforms?

July 2025 Update The team and I separated.

The best best i18n support for SvelteKit (Paraglide by Inlang owned by Opral) hinges on a startup with lots of drama.

Latest update by the founder: “The team and I separated.”

opral.substack.com/p/july-2025-...

We may have our differences, but at the end of the day when we take off our pillow cases we all have upsettingly yellow pillows

Can I assume that it's not rougher than `mdsvex`?

MDSX Markdown preprocessor for Svelte.

The other packages they work on are also interesting.

This one especially: mdsx.dev/docs.

Runed Magical utilities for Svelte 5.

If you use @svelte.dev, remember that runed.dev exists 😊!

One of my favourites: runed.dev/docs/utiliti...

It makes reasoning about user interactions simple, and is a lot more lightweight and easier to use than XState.

Environment variables in SvelteKit Understand SvelteKit's four environment variable options and how to use them securely in different hosting and deployment scenarios.

Environment variables in SvelteKit can be confusing. With this post, I am trying to grok them once and for all.

www.maier.tech/posts/enviro...

You ruined the context in the chat window again in VS Code.

The active editor should always be added to the context. Because 95 of 100 times that's what I want.

Now I have to click 95 times to add the active files instead of clicking 5 times to remove a file I do not want.

Screenshot of the new dark mode colors for www.maier.tech. Contrasts with the three different surface colors are calculated automatically.

Working on an improved color scheme for my website.

Designed with CSS 🚀

#BuildInPublic

Next: train an LLM with this.

Perplexity AI caught in the act Perplexity AI caught using stealth crawlers despite robots.txt rules. Cloudflare exposes the practice, raising concerns for AI industry trust.

I guess we should not be naive about AI companies' crawling behavior. Their appetite for fresh training material seems bigger than their concern for the reputation of the entire industry.

www.maier.tech/notes/perple...

Even better is letting AI do Math and trust the result.

Thilo Maier Hi, I'm Thilo. I am a Software Engineer based in The Netherlands. I build web apps with SvelteKit and Svelte and help people take control of their digital identity.

If you have been subscribing to www.maier.tech via RSS, I goofed up the feed. It's fixed now. If you were redirected to locked URLs, my apologies.

If you hit any page on my website with a feed reader, you should now see 3 feeds: one for Notes and Posts, one for Notes only and one for Posts only.

Disallowing AI Bots in robots.txt How and why I updated my robots.txt to block AI bots from crawling my personal website, while allowing search engines.

If you have not checked the HTTP logs of your website lately, I recommend doing so. I was stunned to see big-name AI bots crawling my website daily, hunting for new training data.

And I decided to do something about it.

www.maier.tech/notes/disall...

You can’t go to Trader Joe’s with Gothamist min tote…

It’s just protecting themselves from user wrath when they discover that all their included tokens were consumed in the first prompt on the first day of the billing cycle.

But everyone hires React 😢

I don’t know which is worse: spin up a gas turbine or a small modular reactor (SMR) to fix a TS error.

Smaller hosters like Railway don't have a web application firewall. That's too bad because I ended up wrapping Big Tech around Railway.

www.maier.tech/posts/droppi...

Just wait until political decision makers use LLMs to make better decisions.

Screenshot from Google Maps showing the name "Amsterdam Centraal" followed by a logo of Deutsche Bahn.

Google Maps in NL is full of surprises, not only while you navigate. Amsterdam Centraal with the logo of Deutsche Bahn is hilarious.

Transit directions work much better with www.ns.nl. And for car and bike navigation OSM-based www.magicearth.com rocks.

Mixed success. Seems to work fine here on BlueSky but does not work on Mastodon.

Maybe image generation is too slow for Mastodon?

Penpot's missing SVG text-to-path feature Why Penpot's lack of SVG text-to-path conversion matters for logos, and how to work around it.

Here comes the OG image test...

www.maier.tech/notes/penpot...

Has the Svelte team considered adding first class Markdown support to SvelteKit?

SvelteKit plus Mdsvex covers the basics but it comes with a few pain points, e.g. it adds its own layout type and the frontmatter metadata are locked in inside the Mdsvex layouts.

There are 2 paths to successful vibe coding:

1 don’t bother with the wires in the wall, focus on the light bulb turning on or off, or

2 you are a talented micro manager that grinds through never ending prompts to coerce the model to write what you had in mind.

In your blog you recommend Phil Stainer's worktree extension for VS Code. Is there a way to create a new worktree with this extension and copy selected files or folders, e.g., `.env`?

I have been using Git worktrees for almost a year. New issue, new worktree. It's like a local GitHub Codespace. Such a nice workflow.

Battery health decline depends on your personal usage and is kind of random.

Just check if capacity is close to 80% a few weeks before your warranty expires. Then you might get the battery replaced on warranty.

What's your monthly Cursor bill these days 😜?