Skills, MCP servers, and subagents all extend an agent — but they do three genuinely different jobs. A plain-language guide to what each one is, where each one runs, and how to pick the right one (often you'll use all three).
I pulled 12 skills out of my agent-skills hub, cloned each one, and inspected the actual files — what's in the SKILL.md, how the description triggers, what ships alongside. Here are the ones worth installing, with the honest caveats.
A skill is one markdown file in a folder — but the difference between a skill that fires at the right moment and one that never loads is a few lines of metadata. Here's the full anatomy of a SKILL.md, with a real example taken apart line by line.
Decision models are a new kind of AI model: state and typed questions in, structured answers with probabilities out — no generated text. Here's what they are, why they matter at every stage of an agent's lifecycle, and how TypeSafe's Jev works in practice.
All three open-source agent harnesses promise to self-improve — but they mean very different things. I compared Prime Agent, Hermes, and Pi on architecture, memory, self-improvement, and real benchmark numbers, so you can pick the one worth rewiring your workflow for.
The complete tour of my agent-skills hub: all 90 indexed skills across 8 categories, linked on GitHub so you can browse the index and put a skill to work in minutes.
A practical pass at making a Next.js site legible to AI answer engines: allowing the crawlers, publishing llms.txt, adding FAQPage and HowTo schema without hand-maintaining it, and asserting in the build output that all of it actually rendered.
Most multi-tenancy writing stops at row-level security. The genuinely hard problems start after that: a master database that owns tenants, billing and identity, users who belong to several tenants at once, and keeping the control plane and the tenant databases coherent.
scrcpy is excellent for Android screen mirroring, but it ships without a GUI—so testers who do not live in terminals struggled. I spent a weekend on a small open-source Windows wrapper that downloads ADB and scrcpy, guides USB debugging, and ships as a normal .exe installer.
A practical look at Retrieval-Augmented Generation: embeddings, vector search, and how to wire them to an LLM—plus how this portfolio implements the same pattern with Next.js, Supabase pgvector, and Hugging Face.
Practical, easy-to-apply security improvements for any online project — from security headers, rate limiting, login protection, to safe file uploads and more.
Learn how to create an automated MongoDB backup system using shell scripts that dump databases, compress them, and upload to AWS S3 with automatic cleanup.
Production-ready guide to deploy a Next.js app on Ubuntu using Git for code, PM2 for process management, Nginx as reverse proxy, and Certbot for HTTPS.
Step-by-step guide to creating a self-signed certificate with OpenSSL and configuring Nginx with secure defaults.
Step-by-step guide to installing and configuring vsftpd on Ubuntu, creating a restricted FTP user, and opening firewall ports.
Harden an Ubuntu server by creating a non-root user with SSH key-based access, disabling root login, and configuring sudo privileges.
Understanding forwardRef in React: when to use it, why it's necessary, and practical examples for building reusable components.
A comprehensive guide to understanding when and why to use useEffect, useMemo, and useCallback in React applications.
