The art of simplicity

Last week I talked about Continuous AI and how the VSCode Automation feature is one example of this vision My blog posts were just written when a new VS Code update landed on my machine with some Automation improvements included. First the automation feature is no longer in preview but enabled by default. But the feature I want to talk about is that you can start sharing automations; either by shipping automation templates through an agent plugin, or by exporting and importing automations as a file. Let's look at both. What gets shared? An automation is a saved prompt, a session configuration and a schedule. Not all of that travels well between machines, so VS Code only shares the portable part: Name and prompt Schedule (manual, hourly, daily or weekly) File format version and an identifier What is not shared: workspace, provider, model, permissions, enabled state and run history. The person who receives the automation makes those choices locally. Thi...

Yesterday I wrote about Automations in the GitHub Copilot app as a hands-on example of Continuous AI — recurring, event-triggered AI tasks running in the background instead of you kicking them off by hand every time. The inkt is not evey dry, or the same concept landed in the latest VSCode release: the VS Code Agents window now has its own Automations feature (still in preview at the moment of writing this post). Let's take it for a spin. Turning it on Automations live in the Agents window sidebar. Two prerequisites: Have the Agents window set up with an available agent. Enable the chat.automations.enabled setting. Creating one In the Agents window sidebar, select Automations , then Create Automation — or start from one of the templates under Start with a template , which pre-fills a prompt and schedule for you. Give it a Name and write the Prompt . Be specific about scope and expected output. Straight from the docs, a solid example: Review all...

In my experience as a software architect, most of what makes CI/CD valuable isn't the "integration" or the "deployment" part. It's the "continuous" part. Things happen in the background, on their own schedule, without someone needing to remember to trigger them. GitHub Next has been pushing a term for what happens when you apply that same idea to AI: Continuous AI , the use of automated AI to support software collaboration on any platform. Not a single tool, not something GitHub owns, just a category. The claim is that this will become as standard a part of software development as CI/CD is today. What Continuous AI actually covers The GitHub Next team lists a handful of recurring patterns: Continuous Triage (labeling and responding to issues), Continuous Documentation (keeping docs in sync with code), Continuous Fault Analysis (explaining failed CI runs), Continuous Summarization, Continuous Code Improvement. Different tasks, same shape. Th...

One of the first things I see people do when you hand them an AI coding agent is build what I call "micro-apps": small applications that solve one specific problem they're having. A colleague of mine built a tool that scans our servers for outdated configurations so we could follow up on the migration process. Another built his own planning tool to support the yearly planning cycle. The code itself takes an agent minutes to produce. The problem shows up right after. The app still needs to be hosted somewhere. That's typically the point where non-technical people get stuck. They don't have a place to deploy a small web app, they don't want to manage a server for something this small, and asking IT to provision infrastructure for a five-minute tool feels disproportionate. This is where the canvas feature in the GitHub Copilot app comes in. Using the /create-canvas slash command, you can turn a conversation with Copilot straight into an interactive interface...

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" ...