Chris Sells

After losing Mint and Personal Capital, and now Empower is moving my cheese again, I needed a stable place to track my accounts.

Then I found @SimpleFin (www.simplefin.org).

And since I wanted to build my own apps, I built simplefin_dart: pub.dev/packages/sim...

Enjoy.

Has anyone tried Zed? I resisted it but am really liking it, especially how they do AI coding agents via the Agent Client Protocol. If it supported Flutter the way VSCode did, I think I'd switch.

dartantic_ai | Dart package Dartantic is an agentic framework designed to make building client and server-side apps in Dart with generative AI easier and more fun!

dartantic_ai v1.3.0 release @ pub.dev/packages/dar...:

- Anthropic thinking support exposed like the OpenAI Responses provider, so you can write your code to look for thinking output regardless of the provider

- Ollama typed output support

- Mistral usage tracking

dartantic_ai | Dart package Dartantic is an agentic framework designed to make building client and server-side apps in Dart with generative AI easier and more fun!

I shipped dartantic_ai 1.2.0: pub.dev/packages/dar...

- Migrated Google provider to the new Google-supported
package, fixing some low-level response issues.

- Added Google "double agent" orchestrator to support typed output with tools simultaneously.

- Added llms.txt for LLM readers.

- And more!

YouTube video by Calgary Software Crafters AI Talks - Lada Kesseler: Augmented Coding: Mapping the Uncharted Territory

Been using AI coding agents for a while? Then watch this video to have Lada Kesseler turn your niggling suspicions into "I knew it!"s: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LSK...

Lada has pulled out the Gamma-style patterns out of coding agents. #recommended

Home Dartantic is an agentic framework designed to make building client and server-side apps in Dart with generative AI easier and more fun! - csells/dartantic_ai

Interested in how dartantic does all of the cool things it does? Check out the wiki: github.com/csells/darta...

Server-Side Tools - Dartantic AI Documentation Use provider-hosted capabilities such as web search, code execution, and image creation without writing local tool handlers.

docs.dartantic.ai/server-side-...

Dartantic v1.1.0 is out and this is a big release!

New OpenAI Responses provider, including session persistence (aka prompt caching), intrinsic server-side tools, and thinking metadata streams.

Thanks to @jezell.bsky.social for his openai_core package!

Check out dartantic.ai for the deets.

Building Repo Bench – Repo Prompt Blog How I built a benchmark to measure what truly matters for AI coding assistants - file editing precision, instruction following, and handling complex context.

Interested in the core issues in building a real-world AI coding agent? Start with @pvncher's amazing blog post: repoprompt.com/blog/buildin...

I'm busy working on a new dartantic release and as part of that, Sonnet 4.5 runs examples like this:

`DARTANTIC_LOG_LEVEL=FINE dart run server_side_vector_search.dart`

This was surprising, since dartantic had no environment check for a logging level.

But now it does. : )

Been spending a bunch of time with Gemini 2.5 Pro for coding this weekend.

It's about 80% as smart for coding as GPT5 and Opus 4, but when I use it, I can't juggle between multiple agents on different projects:

2.5 Pro is too fast!

Not a bad tradeoff to be honest.

csells | Algora Chris Sells is an advocate for developers. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various technologies.

Holy cow. Somebody thinks that I'm in the top 1% Dart engineers in the world. I do love Dart!

algora.io/profile/csells

I used to get up in the morning and deal with my messages.

Now I check the progress of my AI agents and direct them to the next step, while my messages go unmanaged.

AI just feels more creative and fun.

TIL not to use AI to code a protocol client and server in the same project at the same time, as it will surely route around the protocol restrictions to get things working.

Instead, build the new server/client against known working implementations first.

This is the way.

YouTube video by Matt Maher Stop Letting AI Wing It -- Take Control of AI Coding

Want to know how to get the best from agentic coding agents? Matt's video represents the best explanation for getting solid results that I've seen (aka this is what I do so it must be right : )

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBWn...

I think I said to an AI coding agent today: "you're fixing the test to not require the thing we're testing for? why would you betray me like that? do you hate america?"

the reply: "Ha — I promise I don’t hate America. I hate flaky tests."

who says you can't make work fun? : )

Cline v3.25: The Coding Agent Built for Hard Problems - Cline Blog In v3.25, Cline never lets go of the thread.

Cline is continuing to dig into solving real-world problems with heavy duty AI agents:
cline.bot/blog/cline-v...

Focus: attention isn’t enough - Cline Blog Bigger context windows don’t stop coding agents from drifting. Cline’s new Focus Chain keeps every step anchored to the goal — so even the longest tasks finish exactly where they’re meant to.

"We aim to emphasize high-value tokens: where every step in a plan is deliberate, relevant, and positioned where the model can use it. By anchoring the agent on what matters most, we make better use of every token — and focus the model’s attention."

cline.bot/blog/focus-a...

Welcome to dartantic_ai 1.0!

- 11 providers (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, ...)
- Tool calling with typed I/O
- Runs everywhere Dart runs

sellsbrothers.com/welcome-to-d...

Supercharge Your Dart & Flutter Development Experience with the Dart MCP Server By Ander Dobo — Product Manager, and Kenzie Davisson — Engineer

I've had some early experience with the Dart MCP Server and it's got a ton of potential for attaching AI agents to your running Flutter apps: medium.com/flutter/supe...

Vibe Coding With Steve and Gene

for sure all the usual places, i.e. YouTube, asking ChatGPT for a personalized tutorial, etc.

also, I'm looking forward to the book these two are talking about on this YT channel: www.youtube.com/@VibeCodingW...

Well I mostly ship APIs, so ..

I have discovered that I am as picky as any artist with their work.

Dartantic 1.0 was functionally complete and passing >1000 tests across 11 chat model providers and 4 embeddings model providers three days ago.

But I couldn't ship it because it wasn't *right*.

The 5 Stages of AI Grief: sellsbrothers.com/the-5-stages...

"If something must happen, please don't use a stochastic process to do it. Eventually, due to the nature of sampling from a probability distribution, it will fail to do the thing that must be done." @domesticmouse.com

[feat] add support for Gemini Live from firebase_ai · Issue #124 · flutter/ai Check out this docs issue: firebase/flutterfire#17413 Check out this sample: https://github.com/firebase/flutterfire/blob/main/packages/firebase_ai/firebase_ai/example/lib/pages/bidi_page.dart

Unfortunately not yet. It's on my list to of flutter_ai_toolkit v2 features [1] but I'm waiting on the thumbs up from the Flutter team to start work on that.

[1] github.com/flutter/ai/i...

How to run private, on-device AI in your Flutter App using Cactus Deploy private, offline, on-device AI in your Flutter app in a few lines of code.

I've been talking to the Cactus folks about getting their local LLMs for mobile into dartantic. In the meantime, don't let that stop you from bringing them into your mobile Flutter apps: medium.com/@shemet0roma...

flutter_ai_toolkit changelog | Flutter package A set of AI chat-related widgets for Flutter apps targeting mobile, desktop, and web.

I'm happy to announce flutter_ai_toolkit v0.9.2. This release slays the remaining bugs on the road to v1.0 plus:
- multi-turn tool call support
- support for uploading attachments to the cloud
- overriding the speech-to-text conversion

pub.dev/packages/flu...

sellsbrothers.com/a-young-soft...

YouTube video by Eugene Snaps "Don't Wait To Be Hired!" Chris Sells about Young Devs, Future of Coding and AI | Promptonomics #1

I was on an AI-focused podcast last week about how to think about AI as a new software engineer. Take a look: youtu.be/AgSHvUgxio0?...