More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively
After developing Paledev Dark Theme for Visual Studio 2026, I decided to bring the same visual identity to Visual Studio Code. Paledev is a modern dark theme inspired by Palenight, built for better readability, stronger contrast, and long coding sessions. clear code readability balanced contrast a clean, consistent palette comfort during long sessions A theme is something you see for hours every d
The problem Every time you open ChatGPT or Claude, it has zero memory of your project. You spend the first 10 minutes of every session re-explaining your stack, your folder structure, your naming conventions, your architecture decisions, before you can ask the actual question you came to ask. 63% of developers in the Stack Overflow 2025 survey (49,000 respondents) said AI tools lack crucial contex
I Built a VS Code Extension to Bring IntelliJ’s “Show History for Selection” Experience If you come from IntelliJ, you probably miss one super useful feature in VS Code: Show history for selected lines. I built a new extension to solve exactly that. Show History for Selected Code This extension helps you inspect Git history for a specific code selection, not just the whole file. Shows commit h
Microsoft's 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' Tag: Unpacking the Strategic Play for AI Dominance in VS Code The persistent insertion of 'Co-Authored-by: Copilot' into commit messages within VS Code—often irrespective of GitHub Copilot's active contribution to specific changes—is far from a benign engineering detail. It represents a calculated, multi-faceted strategic maneuver by Microsoft, signaling a pr
Have you ever looked at code you wrote six months ago and thought: "Who wrote this monster?"? Relax, it happens to all of us. In software engineering, writing code that a machine understands is the easy part. The real challenge is writing code that other humans (including your future self) can understand, maintain, and scale. This is exactly where Software Design Principles come into play. In this
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about