Reading Notes #708

I’ve gathered a few insightful pieces this week exploring smarter ways to manage AI costs, practical hardware setups, and the foundational logic behind better programming. Each link offers a different perspective on how we can refine our workflows and think more intentionally about the tools we use every day.

AI

• MCP Beyond the Chat Window: Build Diagnostics in CI (Jan , Yuliia) - Instead of copy-pasting the log, the promises of this MCP server are very interesting.

• Why Reusing AI Instructions Costs You More Tokens (Ken Muse) - This post shares great advices on how we must think when writing or planning skills and queries.

• Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi (Lucy Hattersley) - Tease about a very interesting post (available in the Raspberry Pi Official Magazine) more to come

Databases

• Learning a few things about running SQLite (Julia Evans) - Nice post sharing some useful lessons learned.

Programming

• The Power Of “Why?” (codemanship) - A great post that reminds us that asking the right question helps us understand the real need and build better solutions.

Miscellaneous

• The Knowledge You Give Away (Mark Downie) - A quote that hopefully makes us think.

• Microsoft reveals 15+ products losing support in 2026, check if you're affected (Abhijith M B) - It's worth having a look while you have time to plan something. Products will continue to work, but no more updates or support.

~frank

Reading Notes #704

This week’s collection highlights practical ways to improve developer workflows, from faster test runs and more manageable pull requests to intuitive new AI integrations. I have gathered a few standout articles on Blazor components, Azure Functions updates, and the nuances of training coding agents for your specific stack.

Suggestion of the week

• Stop overloading your skills - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - The post ends with: "In many cases, models don’t need a textbook. They needed a cheat sheet." It's so true! And this post explains why and how to validate it.

Programming

• I built a little Claude that dances when it needs me (Jim Bennett) - I've been thinking about one of those notifications, and I really like what Jim did here. Have a look, it's way more useful than you think

• How to Filter a Blazor Table Control using .NET | ComponentOne (Ashwin Saxena) - Another Blazor component: ComponentOne. It's nice to have options.

Open Source

• How pull request limits are cutting down the noise (Camilla Moraes & Ashley Wolf) - This will help control the flow for many OSS projects. Hopefully, it will be seen positively by the communities.

DevOps

• Distributed Test Runs in the Aspire Community Toolkit | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - I didn't know all that was possible. This is a great post that shares the optimization iterations to make unit test runs take less time.

AI

• Azure Functions MCP Extension: What's New at Build 2026 (Lily Ma) - An easy win. Simple to write, fast and straightforward to deploy, and serverless.

• Intelligent Terminal 0.1.1 is here: bash support, new slash commands, and more customization (Hamza Usmani) - Finally! I know someone who has wanted this terminal for a very long time. It looks nice, I saw the demo at Build.

• When the model has never seen your code - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - A very interesting post, part of a series about how to make AI coding agents work correctly with your technology.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

 ~frank