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 — FRAP aka as "the zoomies"

Clarissa "What if we kissed on the Cray supercomputer loveseat?" Vibe coding and quality "When you hear that some app was “vibe coded”, how much quality do you expect?" I was just wondering about this very topic. I think LLMs can do a remarkably good job

Read more 12 min read

Reconcile in Expense

And I made a cool thing in Expense that I find incredibly useful. Once a month comes along and I have my statements, I import the PDFs into Expense and let it reconcile the expenses. It looks up if the expense already exists in my list and reconciles it if

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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

Read more 2 min read
August 15th, 2026 8 min read

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

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August 12th, 2026 1 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

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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 steward 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" feels

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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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