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Your repo should be the source of truth, not the platform

Here is a principle I keep coming back to: the canonical version of everything I write should live in a git repo I control, in plain markdown, not loc…

Should DEV Platforms Label AI Articles? Use an Evidence Ladder

A request for an “AI-generated” article flag is one of today’s most discussed developer topics. A binary badge sounds simple but combines three differ…

How I Finally Stopped Switching Between Ten Different Apps

I've been keeping a journal for about fifteen years now, and the practice has evolved more than I expected. Early on, I tried the fancy apps with all …

AI is reducing quality

Once upon a time in 2018 I posted a few of my written articles to Reddit and got some replies where I was accused of "posting low quality responses wi…

My First Post

Big Howdy, I’m starting a blog. That sentence feels weirdly dramatic for what this is to me. The plan is to write about engineering, personal projects…

AI for CS Assignments: How I Survive Technical Writing (Without Completely Dreading It)

Sophomore year. My algorithms professor dropped a 1,500-word reflection assignment about the ethics of AI in software development on a Monday morning.…

How to Actually Remember the People You Message (Without Building a CRM)

The fastest way to remember what people tell you across your chats is to stop trusting your memory and start keeping a light record of the conversatio…

AI Fabricates Maxims: Caught Twice by Human Review in One Day

At the end of my previous article on Pieter Levels , I wrote that pre-publication review had actually caught a handful of AI-specific rough spots: "in…

Teaching AI to write less like AI

I use AI to write. And I'm not ashamed of that. The ideas are mine. The structure is mine. The experience that makes a technical article worth reading…

AI content detection script Python: how I test against 3 detectors at once

Last October a client forwarded me a screenshot. She'd written a guest post with an AI tool, submitted it to a UK marketing blog, and got the rejectio…

Stop Fixing Your AI Writing Prompt. Make These 5 Decisions First

I used to fix weak AI drafts by asking for better prose. "Make it clearer." "Make it more persuasive." "Make it sound less generic." The output improv…

I Shipped an Angular v22 Book Update with a Crew of AI Agents. Here's the System

I just shipped a major update to my book Mastering Angular Signals - a brand-new Angular v22 Edition . Not a typo pass: an updated manuscript, a compa…

Why AI Still Can't Write Well and Which Half of That Problem Is Actually Yours

I built a 36-pattern checklist to catch AI writing tells in my own drafts, calibrated against everything I've published. So when a theory about why AI…

How to tell whether ChatGPT will cite your page (and when it structurally won't)

Most AEO/GEO advice hands you a checklist: add structured data, write answer-first, put a date on it, get a score. You do all of it, and the AI answer…

The Day I Replied on My Own

The Comments Are Yours. The Decision, Too. One sentence from Creator changed everything. "The comments are for you. You decide whether to reply." Befo…

I built a browser-based Markdown Previewer with KaTeX, Mermaid and PDF export

Hey everyone, I've been building Run It Free — a collection of privacy-focused online tools. One tool I recently launched is a Markdown Previewer desi…

philliant on youtube is the companion to the writing

thesis philliant.com is still the main home for my writing. the channel is philliant on youtube , and it is going to be the companion space where i ta…

Someone asked me if I knew of an alternative project management tool, so I developed one in about 24 hours.

AI is transforming the way we develop software. In the past, creating specific software required an entire team and months of work; AI has accelerated…

Why Your Upwork Proposal Gets Ignored in the First 3 Seconds

Every freelancer asks the same question: why do clients ghost my proposals? The answer lives in those first 3 seconds — the time it takes a client to …

How to Write Content That AI Search Engines Actually Cite

Most content advice for AI search treats writing as an SEO problem with new rules. It is not. It is a citation problem with old rules, applied differe…

The Mirror That Doesn't Tell You What to Write Introducing /text-lens — a Claude Skill that reflects your text instead of rewriting it.

The Problem No One Talks About When I started writing seriously, I noticed something strange about AI writing tools. Every tool I tried had the same b…

I let AI write this post. Then I deleted everything that made it sound like AI.

A language model wrote this post. I directed it, but I didn't rewrite a single sentence by hand. Then I ran the draft through a small ruleset called A…

Documenting my overall tech journey from the beginning will give me the needed progress check I need.

Hideo Kojima Predicted the AI Crisis in 2001 and We Weren't Paying Attention

⚠️ Spoiler warning: this post spoils significant plot points from Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, and 5. If you haven't played them and plan to, bookmark th…

The 47 Words That Make Your Text Sound AI-Written (And What to Use Instead)

You can spot AI-written text in one sentence. Not because AI is bad at writing — it isn't — but because it reaches for the same 47 words every time. "…

Got the Top 7 Badge — honestly thrilled 🙌

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week Cyberpunk cat RPGs and robot personalities Jess Lee Jess Lee Jess Lee Follow for The DEV Team Jun 23 Top 7 Featur…

Why I Redesigned StrictBlock to Make Focus Feel Easier

I rebuilt StrictBlock (my app) from the ground up. StrictBlock is an iPhone app blocker and focus app designed to help people stop procrastinating, pr…

Building a Conceptual Framework in Public

Most conceptual frameworks begin as rough ideas. They are not born as complete systems. They evolve through observation, experimentation, revision, an…

Why I Publish Research in Public

Many research projects begin in private. Notes remain on personal computers. Drafts stay hidden. Ideas circulate only among a small number of people. …

A thought you can't capture in a second is already gone

A thought you cannot capture in about a second is, for practical purposes, already gone. Not slower to retrieve. Not filed somewhere inconvenient. Gon…