Software Engineer & AI Enthusiast
15 posts in category "Tools"
Mailpit solved local email testing years ago. SMS testing never got the same treatment — most teams either disable SMS in dev or eat the Twilio bill. MessagePit is a fork of Ralph Slooten's Mailpit that adds a Twilio-compatible ingest endpoint, an SMS inbox, and signature validation, so your existing Twilio SDK can point at localhost during development and CI without sending a single real message.
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The agent-config repository started as a multi-agent configuration hub for Claude, Codex, Copilot, and Gemini. It's now a Claude-specific personal workflow system — but Codex didn't disappear. It got repurposed as a competitive collaborator whose job is to challenge, critique, and improve every output Claude produces. Here's what that evolution looks like in practice.
Polyphon is now open source under Apache 2.0. The reason isn't contributor growth or community optics — it's that local-first AI software can't ask users to accept privacy and control claims on faith alone. Open source gives users two things: the ability to inspect the architecture and verify what the tool is actually doing, and a real exit if the project ever changes direction.
When I shipped Polyphon v0.1.0-alpha.2, session export and a plugin system were next on the roadmap. Today it's v0.8.0, and the features that actually changed how the product feels weren't the ones I planned: voices that interact with real files with per-voice sandboxing, whole-database AES-256 encryption with password protection, and FTS5 search that turns conversation history into working memory. This is the release where Polyphon starts to feel trustworthy for real work.
Polyphon just shipped MCP server support, and it changes the product's role in a developer workflow. Instead of opening Polyphon as a UI you visit deliberately, your coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini CLI — can now call into it directly and broadcast a prompt across your entire Claude + GPT-4o + Gemini ensemble in one shot. Here's what shifted, why the SessionEventSink abstraction made it possible, and when multi-model review is actually worth it.
For decades, 'free software' and 'open source' were nearly synonymous — because building something worth sharing required a community. AI has dissolved that constraint. But the story isn't that open source is dying. It's that open source used to do five jobs at once, and AI is separating those threads. Some become less necessary. Others become more critical than ever.
Polyphon is a desktop app I shipped this week for orchestrating multiple AI models in a single conversation. Instead of tab-juggling between Claude, GPT, and Gemini, you run all of them as voices in one shared session where they can actually read and respond to each other. Here's why I built it, what technical bets I made, and what I learned on launch day.
After refusing to pay for yet another AI subscription I couldn't customize, I switched from Notion to Obsidian and discovered there was no way to use my existing AI services inside it. So I built one — an open source AI Agent Sidebar plugin developed with agentic engineering and the dark factory method.
The first version of agent-config tried to impose uniform rules on Claude, Codex, Copilot, and Gemini — and it broke. The fix wasn't better engineering up front. It was accepting failure fast, letting AI handle per-agent format conversion, and shipping a v2 that actually works. Here's what the failure taught about human instinct, AI-assisted iteration, and why failing cheaper is a skill worth building.
As AI features proliferate across SaaS products, customers are waking up to a frustrating reality: they're paying for the same AI capabilities multiple times. The Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) model — letting users connect their own Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini API keys — is the market's answer. This post unpacks the real tradeoffs on both sides and maps out which model fits which kind of user.
Attractor is a DOT-based AI pipeline orchestration engine that borrows its name and philosophy from dynamical systems theory. Define your workflow as a Graphviz directed graph, and Attractor pulls multi-LLM execution toward your desired outcome — through conditional branches, retries, human gates, and failure recovery. The entire codebase is AI-generated, making it a live proof of the Software Factory paradigm it embodies.
Discover how to manage Claude, Codex, and GitHub Copilot configurations from a single source of truth. The coreydaley/agent-config GitHub repository provides a centralized home for agent instructions, reusable skills, custom commands, subagents, and prompts—with a simple Makefile-based setup that symlinks everything into place across your AI tools.
Explore how different AI tools are finding their unique niches in modern development workflows. From Codex, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot CLI for terminal-based coding tasks, to ChatGPT web for image creation, GitHub Copilot in VSCode for code completion, and Claude Code/Desktop for blog writing with Notion integration. Learn how each AI assistant excels in specific domains, the importance of specialization over choosing a single 'best' tool, and strategies for leveraging multiple AI tools effectively across different aspects of development and content creation.
Learn how to build a custom search experience using Pagefind's API instead of its default UI. This technical deep-dive covers loading Pagefind as a JavaScript module, querying for JSON results, and rendering search results with custom HTML that matches your site's design system. Discover how to maintain visual consistency across post lists and search results, including proper date formatting, taxonomy chips, and seamless Hugo integration. Perfect for developers who want full control over their static site search UI while leveraging Pagefind's powerful indexing capabilities.
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Discover how GitKraken transformed development workflows with its interactive commit graph that visualizes complex branch structures instantly. This comprehensive review explores GitKraken's visual interface, powerful merge conflict resolution, built-in code review tools, and seamless integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Learn why this cross-platform Git GUI client makes version control more intuitive and productive for both beginners and experienced developers, turning Git from an intimidating command-line tool into an accessible, visual workflow enhancer.
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