Issue 0

Nathan Arthur
April 20, 2025

This is issue zero! Thanks for being here.

Definitely reply if you have thoughts on the content, format, or whatever. (I think you can do that? I guess let me know if replying to this email doesn’t work, either. My email is [email protected])

Hope you’re having a great weekend!
Narthur

Documentation Scraping

I've been experimenting with scraping documentation and adding it to my repositories to improve the effectiveness of tools like Codebuff and Cursor. Initially I've been using mdCrawler for this purpose, but I've also been experimenting with building my own repo to crawl a whole list of documentation sources. So far I've been using crawler and turndown for the experiment.

Building Agentic AI

I recently watched Microsoft's beginner course to building agentic AI. And then I built a proof-of-concept agentic system to break down a project into a series of tasks and estimate the time needed to complete each task. I used Praison as my framework to build the tool, along with Codebuff and scraped docs as described above, and Zep for semantic memory. It was surprisingly easy to get something set up and working, though I'm not sure how much more effort it would take to make the tool perform consistently when it comes to accuracy.

Using AI in Pull Requests

I've been experimenting with Copilot's new PR-focused features, including generating PR summaries and requesting a PR review from Copilot. It also has features for iterating on a PR but I haven't tried that yet.

I've also been trying out using Meticulous to automatically test PRs. Their marketing material uses the term AI a ton, I'm not sure how much that's actually true yet. But regardless the concept seems really useful.

Basically you add a script to your site that records your sessions, but only when in development and staging. So you aren't recording end users. When you make a PR, Meticulous then selects a subset of these sessions and replays them both against your PR preview and your production environment. It then generates a report of differences, which you can choose to approve or not. Really neat idea, especially as we may be moving further and further toward "vibe coding."

More Interesting Things

JS Engine lets you run JavaScript inside your Obsidian notes. Plus same person's built some other interesting Obsidian plugins, too.
Lynx is yet another write-once-deploy-anywhere tool set. Anything that pushes us closer to a web-technology-everywhere future is a win in my book.
FilePizza is a browser-based peer-to-peer file transfer tool.
SST is an infrastructure-as-code framework. Maybe similar to Terraform? Maybe better?
Hydrogen is Shopify's official framework for building custom Shopify storefronts.
bolt.new lets you prompt to create an entire web or mobile app in a single go. I literally said "build me a tic tac toe game" and this is what it created and then deployed to Netlify for me.
DSNP is a decentralized social networking protocol (oh, right, that's what it stands for). How does it relate to the AT protocol, ActivityPub, and the Fediverse? I don't know. I try to stay off social media.
Beeminder-friend Mary just published a new visual time management app for iOS.
Anthropic recently added a new $100 Max tier
Anthropic also added a new research feature that looks to be a combination of reasoning and gathering context via multiple searches both of the open web and any of your own information you may have given Claude access to.
Zep is an API for building and referencing a semantic knowledge graph as a kind of memory for AI applications.
Zep published a blog post on The One-Token Trick in which they explain how they’ve leveraged OpenAI’s API to determine the relevance of search results while reducing cost by limiting the LLM’s response to a single token.
Lovable is yet another AI-powered app builder.
This article is a deep-dive on choosing the right products to add lighting to your LEGO sets. I’m especially intrigued by Brickstuff’s modular lighting system.
Voyage AI is a third-party embeddings API recommended by Anthropic’s documentation.

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