Alex Matchneer

“Codegen tools are broken.” They churn out boilerplate, need endless fixes, and rarely feel… smart. So when I asked Codebuff to create a browser-based Minecraft game, I wasn’t sure what to expect as I just told it: 👉 “generate a basic minecraft clone that runs in my browser that lets me move around in the world, explore it, and mine blocks. keep going until it's very recognizable as a minecraft game.” And here’s what happened: ✅ Hover effects to show where blocks drop. ✅ Particle effects when blocks are destroyed. ✅ An instruction overlay showing block types. Codebuff uses two agents: 👨‍💻 A Developer agent to write features. 🕵️‍♂️ A Product Manager agent to critique and refine. The best part? The game actually works. We showed a basic version to a dozen people, and each added their own ideas and features to our project. Check out the demo video for the final version. Check out our Substack post for more information: https://lnkd.in/gVFp4H69

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If you needed one more reason to use TypeScript in 2025, it looks like every single AI tool works better with it than regular JavaScript. For everything beyond weekend projects TypeScript is the clear choice.

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Captain SwiftUI kicks off his new SwiftUI Craftsmanship Series discussing View Contracts. The (inter)face value of a View is really important. Crafting a good one can unlock a Views full potential and usability. Join the Captain as he shares the one question that can make all the difference: “What is this View for?”. https://lnkd.in/eQfcVka6

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At InVision, we worked with some amazing software vendors. I know I've talked about most of these in the past; but, I just want to give a final shout-out to some of my favorites: * LaunchDarkly - feature flags completely changed the way we approached product development. And, allowed us to all but eliminate our incidents and outages (shameless plug for my own book: https://lnkd.in/ehxiy6bY). * Postmark - delivered all of our outbound emails and powered our inbound reply-by-email workflows with flawless uptime and befuddling performance. * Pusher - powered our real-time collaboration via WebSockets, bringing our UIs to life and keeping browsers synchronized. * Intergral | FusionReactor APM - gave us deep insights into our JVM performance, allowing us to track down SQL, API, and processing bottlenecks. * Datadog - truly world-class metrics, alerting, and monitoring. * Adobe ColdFusion / Lucee CFML - the programming language and application server that allowed us to move fast, keep things simple, respond to users, and build wonderful things. * Cloudflare - your CDN, WAF, and web workers took a beating so that our origin servers could stay online. * Amplitude - connected me to the users by giving us insight into what our users were actually doing (or not doing). At one point, I think we had over 300 different SaaS subscriptions; so this list is faaaaar from exhaustive. And, I'm sure I'm forgetting other beloved services. And, many of our teams worked with entirely different technologies. This is just my little corner of the organization. And, I couldn't have done it without them. Thank you so much! ❤️

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Having a ton of fun writing an ORM for V2 of Case Kit. Typescript has such an incredible type system. I have autocompletion for column names, the ability to include relations, relations of relations, etc etc etc... all returning properly typed data (no classes in sight). It's been really satisfying seeing it coming together, and it's been great getting my hands dirty with some (relatively) complex generics. And to head off the obvious question… why aren’t I just using Prisma? Well there’s a couple of things I’m doing differently that I think are marginally better: there’s no code generation involved here, it’s just types (inspired by Drizzle); there’s no Rust binary you need to deploy, and it hews much closer to Postgres behaviour and syntax (the aim here is not to abstract away which database you’re using). But the real blocker to me using Prisma was that its extensions don’t support modifying queries of nested relations - a hard requirement for me due to the way I have multitenancy and soft deletes set up. It’s not shown in the video but the Case Kit ORM lets you write simple middleware that will be applied to every level of a nested query. Perfect for setting timestamps or adding clauses on tenant id or things like that.

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Anthrop\c Anthropic Claude for Android is here Today we’re announcing the Claude Android app. Now, you can use Claude anytime, anywhere on your Android device—for free across all plans including Pro and Teams. The app is designed with the following features:  Multi-platform support: Pick up and continue conversations with Claude across web, iOS, and Android apps  Vision capabilities: Take new pictures or upload files for real-time image analysis  Multilingual processing: Real-time language translation to help communicate or translate aspects of the world around you Advanced reasoning: Claude can help you tackle complex problems, like analyzing contracts while traveling or conducting market research to prepare for a meeting Among many other things, Claude can help you solve problems and make decisions in real time, provide creative inspiration and support productivity on the go. Whether you're drafting a business proposal between meetings, translating menus while traveling, brainstorming gift ideas while shopping, or composing a speech while waiting for a flight, Claude is ready to assist you. To download the Android app, find us on Google Play. Don’t have an Android device? Claude is also available on iOS through the App Store. —The Anthropic team

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If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!

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"We got ghosted mid-project..." 👀 Last week, a well-established industry leader shared their software development reality: Their hourly freelancer walked away mid-project after landing a better opportunity. Can't blame them! But can you afford the risk? 🤔 The true cost of "flexible" software development: 😭 Incomplete projects 😭 Lost momentum 😭 Knowledge gaps 😭 Restart from zero Why a dedicated UK software team is different: 🇬🇧 Project completion guaranteed 🇬🇧 Continuous investment 🇬🇧 Predictable collaboration 🇬🇧 No unexpected exits 🇬🇧 Consistent team 🇬🇧 Uninterrupted progress 🇬🇧 Clear contractual frameworks 🇬🇧 Transparent expectations 🇬🇧 Aligned business goals 🇬🇧 Sustainable Innovation 🇬🇧 Invested local talent 🇬🇧 Deeper understanding 🇬🇧 Long-term relationship Bonus? Supporting UK tech ecosystem and local expertise. Your project deserves more than a transactional approach. Ready to discuss reliable software partnerships? Let's talk. #SoftwareDevelopment #BusinessStrategy #tech

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At Geisel Software, we’ve tackled some of the world’s toughest challenges - and the reason for our success comes down to one thing: **our people.** Great software engineers don’t just have a bag of skills. If you focus on finding someone who’s great at Typescript or React, you’re likely to find someone who’s…average. Why? Because most skills fall on a bell curve. The majority are in the middle. What sets great engineers apart isn’t their skillset, it’s their mindset. Great engineers: ✅ Think differently. ✅ Push themselves further and harder. ✅ See challenges as opportunities to innovate. At Geisel, we’ve shifted our focus to finding greatness in people. During our HR screens, we dig deep to uncover their potential, creativity, values, and drive. Once we find that greatness, we don’t micromanage. We give our team the freedom to grow, learn, and take risks. The results? Engineers who don’t just solve problems, but redefine what’s possible. When you bet on people, they’ll amaze you every time. What’s your approach to building a team?

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Learn how to write custom result builders https://lnkd.in/ehqq5XK 🧐 What are result builders? 🤩 Defining your own 🚀 Ready to use AutoLayout example #swiftlang #iosdev

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A Riddle in Tech: A dev team shipping 55% faster with AI A product where 80% of features are “rarely or never used.” Where’s the problem?

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Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.

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Serverpod continues to strengthen its lead in the Flutter server space with release 2.2! Being used by well known international companies as well as small startups across the world is a testament to its ease of use, power, and scalability. #flutter #makesbackendeasy

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Large scale code change verification... without executing the build for each repository. 🚀 This is going to be an essential element of any practical agentic experience of large scale code transformation, but is a super difficult problem in a couple dimensions: 1. If you execute the repository's build (i.e. like CI does) for each code change, you're talking about a ton of compute, especially when you get into the hundreds or thousands of apps. 2. Even if (1) wasn't a problem, knowing HOW to execute a build for an arbitrary enterprise repository is a super difficult problem in its own right. And the consequences: 1. That's why these solutions are so unbelievably expensive per line of code. But when their proprietors are selling you compute, inefficiency is a win for them? 🤷‍♂️ 2. That's why the few solutions that do this kind of thing with agentic experiences are hyper narrow in what build tool configurations they allow. I'll write more on HOW we just achieved this, but it suffices to say there is enough information in the LST to do compile verification on hundreds of millions of lines of code post recipe making a change, and it costs almost nothing in time or compute.

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As we're getting ever-closer to closing the doors at InVision, I've been feeling an increasing amount of stress and anxiety. I'm not one for meditation, but I do like the idea of a breathing exercise to calm the nerves. As such, I thought it would be fun to use #JavaScript and #AlpineJS to build a small guided "box breathing" exercise that leverages the SpeechSynthesis API for vocalization. Read more: https://bennadel.com/4743

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I had a super hard time finding the right Lead Engineer/technical counterpart for me at my SaaS company. After going down the "hire a technical Co-Founder path" in the very early days of Because and having it not work out (having a co-founder is like a marriage and man it's not easy!)... After hiring older more seasoned technical leaders and having that also not work out... I finally hired the gem that is our Lead Engineer today, Marlin Jayasekera 🙏 He's in his late twenties and he's a better fit for our team than all the older more "seasoned" talent I had hired historically. That doesn't mean our entire team is Gen Z btw (we aren't ageist!) but I learned so many good lessons here I thought were worth sharing for anyone building out their team. In my opinion... 👨‍💻 Your first technical leader (or any early hire for that matter) should be someone who GSD (gets shit done 💩) rather than someone who dreams all day or just wants to "direct resources." 👵 Age doesn't define you. As a 27 year old CEO, I of course embody this value but it's been so cool to see other young leadership at Because quickly earning the respect and love from older peers around them. 🤝It's so important to make sure your early leadership team sees eye to eye with you. The relationship Marlin and I have built is healthy, respectful, and supportive. We know when to challenge each other but we almost always see eye to eye. That's way easier said than done! ✨ I completely trust him to make decisions. We come together once a week for sprint planning (1 week sprints) to set goals together and then I let him and the team go off and execute on those goals. The trust between us is key to let him and the engineering team be successful on their own. What wrong hires have you made that ultimately led you to the right one? ❤️👇

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iManage in the press! Are you ready for the latest round-up of ungated content? If so, check down below: TechRound spills the tea on how iManage overcame its challenges, shaped its evolution and market position: https://lnkd.in/e-V4UTGF Notified shares its predictions on the global legal tech market: https://lnkd.in/e7HqyAxa Alex Smith, Global Product Lead for Knowledge, Search and AI, iManage, shares his thoughts on how billable time should be approached differently now that AI has reduced workflow times from days to hours: https://lnkd.in/emUNPpWJ Jack Shepherd, Legal Practice Lead, iManage, shares his insights on the impact of agentic AI and why you should exercise caution: https://lnkd.in/eW-DZXQ2 #iManage #AI

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