May 2, 2025 6 min read Bakery

April 2025 bakery

I've become persuaded by the idea that we are the product on most social media apps. The thoughts and links that I would have shared on these hellsites, I now aggregate in a monthly post I call the "Bakery."

Half baked

Some written thoughts, but not enough for their own post.

Vibe coding techniques

Ask the LLM to ask you questions. When you provide Cursor / Windsurf with a longer prompt, "Like please add a class that takes in y and does x," append "What questions do you have?" This will encourage the LLM to ask questions to clarify your prompt. I've found this works really well with the Claude-3.7-Sonnet thinking model. It helps refine the idea and keep the LLM on track with what you actually want.

Request testing scripts. After completing a new feature, I'll prompt the LLM with, "I am about to run through x flow we just created in development. Please write a script in the /scripts directory to verify all the data is stored correctly. The script should print the data so I can visually inspect it easily in terminal, then it should verify that the data meets x expectations and then it should delete the data." The results will exceed your expectations. LLM's are incredible at this kind of thing.

Make it learn. After completing a new feature, I'll ask, "Can you review the differences between what you implemented and what I updated?" It will then give a list of differences, "After reviewing the differences between what I implemented and your updates, here are the key changes:...." Then I will prompt with "Apart from x changes that aren't important, please update @lessons.mdc with these learnings. Please remove any lessons that you don't think apply anymore. Please share your changes and reasoning." .mdc is a markdown file variant with a header section and is used for Cursor rules. I use @lessons.mdc to try to better align the AI with my preferences.

You need a task system. For anything that takes longer than a few days of coding you need a task system to manage the project context. I started using Task Master and I strongly recommend this tool. The CLI allows me to keep track of todos. Under the hood it is just using a simple json schema to store tasks. It also comes with an mcp so Cursor / Windsurf can access the CLI commands. Sometimes it's just easier to get the IDE AI to update the tasks.json directly rather than the finicky mcp. Either way, I watched this video to learn about it. I can honestly say it unblocked me on a difficult refactor I'm doing on my GradeBot project.

Raw

Naked links (with new subheadings!).

Software engineering

What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can’t?

Engineering talent is about task-capability, not speed or volume

sean goedecke

Most engineers can do a broad set of normal job tasks, but some can do really hard ones and some can barely do any.

This is a good metaphor - AI is a coding mech suit.

Tools I used

Very cool tool for quickly getting up to speed on a new code base.

This introduced me to task master, which is a great tool for vibe coding.

recorded a 42 min video explaining what @TaskmasterAI is and how to get started with it. didn't get to write code yet so part 2 is coming

i have no idea if you'll find this useful, but if you do, lmk and i'll continue and possibly turn it into a series

open to all feedback! pic.twitter.com/Us7iXfwXuU
— Eyal Toledano (@EyalToledano) April 13, 2025

I'm a big fan of TaskmasterAI. Here the creator demos using it.

Recommended podcasts

If Books Could Kill: The Free Speech Warriors' Guide to Fascism - This is a paywall episode, but is such a good take down of the absurd arguments about free speech I had to share it.