Labnotes

🔥 Weekend Reading

I write a weekly email for people in tech.

Tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff

Weekend Reading — Kanban it

nivs I second that recommendation: An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail. I've been using FastMail for over a year now and I like the progress they're making adding useful new features to the app. Sadly, there are not enough services that support the FastMail API

Read more 8 min read

Fixing USPS Informed Delivery

How I Replaced USPS Informed Delivery With a Cleaner Email Digest So I read this article and I just thought, why not try it out myself? I like Informed Delivery because it emails on days when I receive new mail, so that I don’t have to go downstairs every

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Weekend Reading — The Stalk Market

Karel Titeca "Richard Scarry already summarized everything there is to know about cyber security, about 50 years ago." Yes, I just asked DeepSeek V4 to run a security audit of my code, because why not? The code is not super valuable, the service doesn't hold any

Read more 8 min read

Prompt For Progress

Me just asking DeepSeek to make my app go faster, to which it replies with: The cumulative effect across all the changes so far: the list page went from 6 DB queries to 4 (removed merchants + cached rates + cached account), and the edit page went from loading all expenses to

Read more 1 min read
August 8th, 2026 7 min read

Weekend Reading — The least you can do

a brief history of consumption This week I completed developing the expense report app. This is the software that I am working on for getting all my tax stuff together – receipts, mileage and what not. This is made using Deepseek V4 Flash and the total cost of the project so

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August 6th, 2026 2 min read

Expense — receipt tracking for easier tax filing

$9.20 to vibe-code an app into existence in one week. It's made of 38,000 lines of code and 15,700 lines of comments. Tests make up about 21% of the code. Spec size is about 3,200 words. I understand that "vibe code"

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August 1st, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading — The elderly health category

Pixelcats "Opened the mail .. Derpy arrived early! SQUEE!" Did I just vibe-code an app because I didn’t like the new UI? Why yes I did. I’ve been using Expensify for many years to keep track of my expenses. It was good. There were a few

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July 31st, 2026 4 min read

The Art of War, Applied to Litigation

I have an AI agent that helps me handle legal cases. It's not a lawyer, but I can iterate with it for hours on different scenarios, work on collecting evidence, ask clarifying questions, etc. It charges me an hourly rate of $1.20, so 100x cheaper than an

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July 25th, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading — Industrial complex

Laura Tech Stuff MacPaw releases CleanMyMac CLI for cleaning developer and AI environments on macOS I love that it's a CLI, super easy to use, and cleans up your developer caches, build artifacts, and AI coding junk. brew install cleanmymac Writing & Editing Stack Using Zed, Harper, Vale,

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