The art of simplicity

For years, when a .NET developer said "I need the mediator pattern," the answer was almost automatically MediatR . Jimmy Bogard's library became the default so quickly that a lot of teams never really questioned it, they just added the NuGet package and moved on. That changed in 2025. MediatR moved to a commercial license, and suddenly "just add MediatR" wasn't a free decision anymore. That's a good moment to take a step back and look at what the mediator pattern actually is, and to point out something a lot of developers overlook: if you're already using MassTransit in your project, you already have a mediator implementation available. No extra package, no extra license to think about. Remark: Be aware that MassTransit switched to a commercial license as well starting from version 9. What is the mediator pattern? The mediator pattern is about decoupling the sender of a request from the thing that handles it. Instead of a controller or servi...

Recently I was watching one of my AI agents chew through a feature, and in the middle of its chain of thought it dropped: "Bribing the hamster." My first thought was that I was hallucinating instead of the AI model. My reaction was to check my coffee. My second was to find out what was actually going on. Turns out, it's not a hallucination. It's a feature. The setting behind it VS Code's Copilot Chat has a setting called chat.agent.thinking.phrases . Instead of a static "Thinking..." or "Working..." label while the agent is doing its multi-step work in the background, it rotates through a list of playful phrases. Here's what that setting looks like in practice: "chat.agent.thinking.phrases": { "mode": "replace", "phrases": [ "Bribing the hamster", "Reticulating splines", "Untangling the spaghetti" ] } Remark: "Reticulating splines" ...

As developer or architect, you make a lot of design decisions every day. You picked Redis for caching, or REST over GraphQL, ... . You move on after your decision was made, but in the back of your head a voice keeps asking "should I bother a colleague and ask for a second opinion?" , "what if I forgot something?" , "is this really the right choice?" The GitHub Copilot app can help you out with a (new) slash command: /spar . What /spar actually does /spar switches Copilot from "help me build this" to "convince me this is a bad idea." Instead of accepting your plan and generating code, it starts poking at your assumptions, asks about edge cases, and points out tradeoffs you may have skipped past. Remark: this is different from /plan , which helps you break a task down. /spar assumes you already have a plan and wants to stress-test it before you commit. How to use it Type /spar in the chat composer, followed by whatever...

Microsoft just released The Story of VS Code , an official documentary directed by Stefan Kingham that traces the editor's ten-year journey; from a small team in Zurich building a browser-based editor called Monaco, to the tool most of us now open dozens of times a day. Watching it made me think back on my own relationship with VS Code, which turns out to be more of a slow conversion than a sudden switch. Two editors, one workflow For most of my career I've been a Visual Studio guy. Full IDE, integrated debugger, the whole .NET toolchain in one window. That didn't change overnight. What did change is that VS Code quietly became my default for anything web-related — a bit of JavaScript here, a config file there, a quick edit to a YAML pipeline. For years I ran both editors side by side, each with its own job. Visual Studio for "real" application code, VS Code for everything lighter and faster. The extensions ecosystem got me curious I always liked what t...

In my previous post , I covered what Copilot Spaces are and how to set one up. Spaces live on github.com by default, but you don't have to leave your editor to use one. The GitHub MCP server exposes your Spaces as tools, so you can pull that curated context straight into VS Code. Prerequisites You'll need the remote GitHub MCP server configured for VS Code, and the copilot_spaces toolset explicitly enabled. It's not part of the default toolset. The easiest way is to install the GitHub extension in VS Code. This will also add the GitHub MCP server. But as I mentioned above, you will not find the copilot_spaces toolset out-of-the-box. You need to open up the MCP configuration and explicitly add it there. Add this to your .vscode/mcp.json (or your global MCP configuration): { "servers": { "github": { "type": "http", "url": "https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/", "headers"...

A lot of developers are using GitHub Copilot as their day-to-day agent harness. But most of them seem to be unaware that with a GitHub Copilot license comes more than a CLI and Visual Studio (Code) plugins. One thing you get access to are GitHub Copilot Spaces. GitHub Copilot what? Let me first explain what Spaces are and why they are useful. Why GitHub Copilot Spaces? If you've used Copilot Chat for a while, you recognize the pattern: you paste in the same background information for the third time this week. The same coding conventions, the same architecture decisions, the same "no, we don't use that library anymore" context. Close the conversation, and Copilot forgets all of it. Remark: Part of the answer can be found in building up your CONTEXT.md file and using the GitHub Memory feature but it’s not always the right solution. That's because source code lives in your repositories, requirements live in issues and pull requests, and team conventions o...