The Problem: We Were Flying Blind At Refer, we're on a mission to enable talented individuals to fulfill their professional potential by helping them pursue their ideal job. Behind the scenes, that means a lot of microservices, and recently we decided to consolidate everything into a mono-repository. If you've ever migrated dozens of microservices into a monorepo, you know the drill: contracts b
This technical post walks through the design and implementation of Secure Playground: a local web app that simulates prompt-injection attacks against large language models and demonstrates simple defenses. Provide a minimal, reproducible environment to test payloads and defensive strategies. Make it easy to add new providers and run mutation-based red-team experiments. Offer a leaderboard and scor
So I made a bad trade in my fantasy baseball league. Dropped Kaz Okamoto because — according to my data — he’d been cold for two weeks. In reality, he’s been on a tear for the last 9 days. 😅 This was a bad decision made because of bad data — my stats cron job had hit a rate limit, exited with no errors, and my FastAPI backend kept serving a stale JSON snapshot. Well, I’d been meaning to fix that
The pattern in AI coding tools has been bugging me for a while. You sign up for one of them. You agree to a per-seat subscription. You get exactly one model: the one the vendor picked for you. Underneath, the whole thing is glued to that vendor’s SDK, so even if you wanted to swap models, you couldn’t without forking. Then the next month, a better model ships from a different vendor, and you’re st
I built a React form library 2 years ago. It got almost zero usage. Recently, I revisited the idea and realized the problem wasn’t the code — it was the approach. Most form libraries are powerful, but they come with complexity: too much setup too much wiring too much abstraction So I rebuilt it from scratch with one goal: Make forms stupidly simple. Every time I build a form in React, I repeat the
Grom — Free, Open-Source AI Coding Assistant for VS Code (Ollama, LM Studio, Anthropic, and More) I've been building Grom, a free and open-source VS Code extension that brings agentic AI coding to your machine. No telemetry, no mandatory account, no subscription. If you use Ollama or LM Studio, nothing ever leaves your machine. Grom is a chat + agentic coding extension that lives in the VS Code
I built rewind — a CLI that reads your git repo and tells you in plain english where you left off. But the interesting part isn't what it does, it's how it actually works under the hood. cargo install git-rewind https://github.com/Chronos778/git-rewind
Say you built an AI agent and customers are starting to pay for it. Sooner or later you'll want to charge them by what they actually use, because some customers hammer the agent all day while others send a handful of messages a week. A single flat fee loses money on the heavy users and overcharges the light ones. The billing problem is the same whether your agent runs on your own model (self-hoste