5 open-source developer tools that are better than their well-funded competitors
…It’s not a fork or a separate project; it’s a community-driven build of the exact same MIT-licensed source code that powers VS Code. I have found the transition…
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Claude Code is powerful, but this one setting made it far more useful for real projects
…But if you are using it on a real-world project — one with authentication walls and complex state management, the magic quickly fades away the moment you have to log back into…
I fine-tuned a 7B model to write my Home Assistant automations, and it actually works
…Stage two saved this project Synthesizing conversations using a local LLM For the second stage, I put together roughly 1,400 training pairs that specifically targeted YAML automation generation, mostly pulled from…
Stop treating the Raspberry Pi 5 as a smart home hub — it's actually built for something bigger
…5 pro projects you should try next Your Raspberry Pi isn't living up to its full potential? Try one of these pro projects next Home automation alone does not need this…
Your smart home needs fewer Raspberry Pis and more boring microcontrollers
…But if you’re looking to work with smart home gizmos or automation chains, I’d argue that microcontrollers are actually better than a typical Raspberry Pi. Related 5 projects you can…
I connected 4 services to Claude that have nothing to do with coding, and it's the most underrated way to use it
…From there it was straightforward; Claude could now read both Slack workspaces and Asana projects. There was no need for an automation layer or scheduling tools like Zapier. I had to ask…
The ESP32 quietly became the most important chip in my smart home
…Better presence detection improved the automations Fine-tuning the triggers In the first months of using Home Assistant , nearly all my automations were time-based. Several times they confused and embarrassed me…
Claude Code helped me build maintenance scripts I could actually inspect, not just run
…Checking backups, cleaning old project folders, auditing Docker Compose files, and making sure services still behave correctly all sound easy until they pile up. None of those jobs is exciting, but ignoring…
I replaced my prompt library with a skills folder, and my AI workflow got dramatically faster
…working on projects. The system also feels much easier to maintain. Instead of updating dozens of prompts, I only need to improve a skill once. Every future task automatically benefits from that…
Your next "Raspberry Pi project" doesn't actually need a Raspberry Pi
…The same holds true for building vibration-controlled automations, Bluetooth proxies, custom e-ink dashboards, and practically most IoT projects out there. Although I rely on ESP32 microcontrollers for most of my…