Month summary — May 2026

My colleague created Half Quill, a collaborative writing platform. Its core concept is “picking up where a stranger left off.” If you want to exercise your brain, practice your writing skills, and prevent your brain from rotting, this might be the way to go. There is also no pressure to write, you can just read and see where other people’s minds drifted off to. I also noticed that their latest update allows you to download stories as ebooks. It just keeps getting better and better.

I had the pleasure of attending the Cursor Meetup at the Booking headquarters in Amsterdam. Visiting the Booking office was an adventure in itself. I didn’t get to see all of it, but it was still pretty impressive. There were a few presentations; some dove deep into AI technicalities and applications, while others were closer to the day-to-day developer experience. I especially enjoyed two of them, both given by guys who also work at Booking.

Roy Klein — Engineering Discipline Now, More Than Ever.

I really liked his slide featuring a massive “10x dev, 100x maintenance” quote. With great power comes great responsibility. AI lets you produce code faster, but the real question is how to do so without compromising quality and sustainability. The short TL;DR is that you should batch your changes, and your CI pipeline is the deciding factor in how small those batches can be (if your CI takes 30 minutes, it might not be a great fit for one-liners, but if it takes 2 minutes, your batches can be much smaller). So, the goal is fast CI, paired with a strong emphasis on refactoring. I can’t argue with these points; it sounds perfectly reasonable.

Gal Naor - Don’t Trust The Code You Didn’t Plan

I read somewhere recently that productivity doesn't matter if you work on the wrong thing. With the rapid pace of code generation today, planning has become more important than ever. Gal presented his SDLC plugin for Claude Code and Cursor, which makes code generation much more intentional by using planning as a comprehensive gatekeeper. It helps you answer crucial questions upfront: WHY, WHAT, and HOW.

github.com/galando/temper

Finally, I really enjoyed the Cursor team’s talk on the future of AI-driven engineering and their vision for the product (TL;DR: Autonomous Development and Intent-Oriented Product Creation).

I’ve been exploring some tools lately. Here are some highlights:

• hurl - tool for running HTTP requests defined in plain text format
• sidebery - Firefox extension for tab management
• Unhook - YouTube extension to remove distractions