Making Money From What You Care About: There's this idea floating around that if you're top 1% at anything, you'll make money. It sounds nice but it's not quite true. What is true: being ex

Speeding Up Laravel Tests with tmpfs (MySQL in RAM): If your Laravel test suite is painfully slow and does a lot of database work (multi-tenancy, migrations, seeding), the bottleneck is almost certainly

Rent a Mac M4 Mini and Access It via SSH from Linux: I needed a Mac to run a Laravel test suite. On my ThinkPad T15g with Docker, the tests took so long I gave up after 2 hours. My client said it takes 5

AI Exponentializes Your Tech Debt: If you have tech debt, you're now exponentially worse off, because you can't leverage the massive productivity gains that AI offers, while your compet

Claude Code Uses Your API Key Over Your Subscription, Even When You’re Logged In: If you have both a Claude subscription (Pro/Max) and an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable set, Claude Code will use the API key and bill you at p

Migrate Claude Code Sessions to a New Computer: Moving to a new computer or switching from WSL to native Linux? Here's how to preserve all your Claude Code conversation history and make it accessibl

Breaking Out of the Codex Sandbox (While Keeping Approval Controls): If you're using OpenAI's Codex CLI, you might want it to work like Claude Code does by default: able to run powerful commands, but asking for your app

AI is Changing Jobs. Who Benefits?: Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs. The robots are coming for our work, right? But if you look at what's actually happening in companies right

Configuring Claude Code for Privacy and Noise Control: If you're using Claude Code for development work, you might want to minimize telemetry, disable promotional messages, and keep your Git history clean.

AI is Dumber on Mondays: It's Monday morning. My coffee is hot, my IDE is open, and Claude Code just suggested I fix a bug by... creating the exact same bug in a different fil

Who will feed AI when traffic dies?: Most searches now end without a single click to an actual website. AI companies are training their models on publisher content while destroying the tr

Software Development Costs: Why AI Hasn’t Changed Prices: Everyone keeps asking if AI tools are making software development cheaper. The short answer is no. The long answer is more interesting. I've been buil

: ThinkPad External Monitor Lag: The Hybrid Graphics Problem My Lenovo ThinkPad T15g Gen 2 becomes almost unusable when connecting an external 4K monito

Claude Code is Having Its Cursor Moment: Remember a few months ago when Cursor launched their $200/month plan? They marketed it as essentially unlimited usage with "20x more than Pro." Users

AI is the new social media: I was working on a blog post about how AI would eventually replace social media when OpenAI just... did it. They launched Sora 2 on September 30th wit

Laravel’s $touches Property: Automatic Parent Timestamp Updates: Laravel's $touches property automatically updates parent model timestamps when child models are modified. Basic Usage class Comment extends Model { p

Creating PDFs with Chart.js charts in Laravel using wkhtmltopdf: Rendering Chart.js charts into PDFs with wkhtmltopdf can be surprisingly tricky. wkhtmltopdf uses QtWebKit (an older browser engine), while Chart.js d www.vincentschmalbach.com/creating-pdf...

Only Experts Can Write Good Prompts: Everyone talks about prompt engineering as if memorizing templates and adding "think step by step" will suddenly get you amazing AI results. That's no

ETFs Are Inflating the Everything Bubble: Stock prices are at all-time highs and traditional valuation metrics like P/E ratios are largely ignored. At the same time, passive investing through

GPT-5 is the best coding model in the world (biggest leap since 3.5 Sonnet): GPT-5 doesn't just write code; it thinks like an engineer. When faced with complex dependency conflicts that stumped previous models, GPT-5 takes a me

Laravel Factories: In Laravel, a Factory is a class dedicated to generating instances of your Eloquent models. They solve a fundamental problem: your application needs d

How to Limit WSL2 Resource Usage with .wslconfig: The WSL2 virtual machine (Vmmem process) can consume a significant amount of system memory and CPU. You can set resource limits by creating a .wslconf

Is Docker Making Your Computer Slow? Here Is How to Find the Problem: Does your computer fan get loud when you run Docker or your system becomes sluggish? Usually, the problem is not Docker itself, but a process inside o

Fix Insane Disk I/O in Laravel Sail: Disable MySQL Binary Logs: Is your Docker-based development environment sluggish? Do your fans spin up for no reason? If you run docker stats, do you see your MySQL container wr

Stop Using git checkout: Git 2.23 introduced two commands that replace the two different jobs git checkout used to do: - git switch — change or create branches - git restore

Quickly Restore All Deleted Files in Git: If you’ve accidentally deleted multiple tracked files in your Git repository, you can bring them all back at once using this simple command: git resto

Do Not Use Laravel Cache Tags (And What You Should Use Instead): Laravel's cache tags feature only works with Redis and Memcached. Using it with other cache drivers (file, database, DynamoDB, array) will throw excep www.vincentschmalbach.com/do-not-use-l...

Rendering Bard Content to HTML in Statamic: When working with Statamic's Bard fieldtype programmatically, you'll often need to convert its structured data to HTML. The documentation doesn't make

Testing Statamic Addons: This guide shows you how to test Statamic addons effectively. Testing addons is different from testing regular PHP packages because they depend on Sta

Building Custom UIs with AJAX in Statamic Addons: Creating custom UI components in Statamic addons with AJAX functionality is poorly documented, making it frustrating to implement. This guide shows yo

Creating Statamic Addons: This guide walks you through creating a Statamic addon from scratch. We'll build a real addon that adds functionality to your Statamic installation. W

My LLMs Have Personalities and I Can’t Unsee It: Spending 8+ hours a day with AI assistants does things to you. Time to share my completely scientific personality assessments. GPT-3.5: The Chatterbox

Fixing Cursor IDE High GPU Usage and UI Freezing Issues: Cursor IDE users on Windows 10 with WSL2 and Linux systems have been experiencing significant performance problems that make the editor nearly unusabl

Goodbye Docker Desktop: running Docker natively in WSL 2: After a Windows 10 update Docker Desktop + WSL 2 stopped working: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock WSL distro termin

Making Cursor IDE AI Agents Use Sail Instead of PHP or Composer Directly: When developing Laravel projects with Docker and Sail, it’s important that all commands use Sail to ensure the environment is consistent. However, the

Adding Laravel Sail to Existing Projects: Solving the Database Driver Chicken-and-Egg Problem: When trying to add Laravel Sail to an existing project, you often encounter a classic catch-22 situation. You need to run php artisan sail:install to

Is Q-Star the Next PageRank? What Google’s Antitrust Trial Revealed: Internal documents and testimony from the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust trial against Google reveal that Google uses a previously undisclosed

In AI, $20/Month is the New Free Tier: Let's stop pretending $20/month gets you professional-grade AI access. That era is over. Running LLM inference is expensive, and the honeymoon phase i

Google And The Art Of Weaponizing Privacy: Every time Google makes a "privacy" change, competitors mysteriously lose access to data while Google's own data empire grows stronger. For over a dec

We’re not writing code anymore. We’re directing it.: The best mental model I've found for AI-assisted development: you're a film director. AI Coding is Directing. You have a vision in your head. Your job

Coding with AI: The Limit is No Longer Intelligence, But Cost: For the first time, it's not the AI's capabilities that limit me. It's what I can afford to spend. I use AI for most of my development work, mainly th

Fixing a Slow Windows Explorer with ShellExView: If your Windows File Explorer is unusually slow when browsing folders or scrolling, but fast inside "Save As" dialogs, the cause may be third-party sh

I Used o3 in Cursor and Forgot to Give It Context: It Ate Up All My Credits: I just made a costly mistake while using Cursor IDE that drained my credits in less than a minute. Here's what happened and how you can avoid it. The

The :latest Docker Tag and Potential Issues in Laravel Sail Setups: Using the :latest tag for Docker images in Laravel Sail can cause unexpected problems due to how Docker handles image caching. This post outlines comm

Laravel Sail: npm install Hanging? Try This Simple Fix: When working with Laravel Sail, you might encounter an issue where npm install starts but never completes. The command appears to hang after downloadi

Anthropic’s Infrastructure Problem: Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.7 has established itself as one of the most capable AI models available today. But there's a critical problem that's been

DeepL vs LLMs for Translation: This analysis compares DeepL with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro

Shaping the Future, One Prompt at a Time: The saying "You are who you surround yourself with" takes on new meaning today. Many of us spend a lot of time talking to AI models like ChatGPT. We a

Trump’s Return and Its Effect on My Freelance Business: After three solid years of consistent client work across Europe and the US, I'm finding it significantly harder to secure new projects. This change li

Finding Long Files for Better Cursor IDE Performance: As a developer working with Cursor IDE, you've probably run into the line limit issue. Cursor has limitations on how large files can be for effective