Curio

Write the phases of a software project down and they line up neatly: business case, requirements, plan, spec, build. The reason the order exists is not to collect those documents, though. It is to put every chance of being wrong in the place where being wrong is still cheap. So the most useful column in … Read more

A product page can say “agentic AI platform” without a single agent behind it. Gartner put a number on that in June 2025: of the thousands of vendors marketing agentic AI, it estimated only around 130 had real agentic capability, and it gave the practice a name, agent washing. That gap is the reason this … Read more

Your first dev meeting is a wall of acronyms: PRD, POC, MVP, and whatever an RFP is. The vocabulary is smaller than it sounds, though, and pairing up the words that always travel together gets you down to about fifteen. “When does the PRD land?” “Let’s do a POC first.” “Is that in the MVP?” … Read more

I clicked download on a nine-second “thank you” GIF. The file that landed was 18MB. This blog’s home page was 2.8MB before we converted every image to WebP to get it down. One reaction GIF would have undone all of that six times over. That was the most useful thing I learned from a day … Read more

Sometimes all you want is one effect on an image you already have, and opening a full editor for it feels absurd. I ran three browser tools through their paces: one builds repeating patterns, one turns photos into halftone dots or stipple, one tracks moving blobs in video and draws boxes around them. Nothing to … Read more

I spent a day clicking through three browser tools that do something with letters. One turns your handwriting into a font. One builds a typeface from sliders. One throws your sentence into 3D space and animates it. All three are free, and none asked me to sign up. After trying them, the line that mattered … Read more

You already know the big free-image sites. Unsplash, Pixabay — I rounded those up last time. This is a different shelf. Smaller, more specialized, the kind of thing you reach for mid-project: 3D icons, PSD mockups, Figma UI kits, open-source fonts. Eight of them. I picked on one thing above all — whether the license … Read more

You need to crop one photo, shrink it, maybe knock out the background. Search around and everyone points you straight at Photoshop — and a monthly subscription you didn’t plan on. Here’s the short version: most of the time, you don’t need it. And the free side got a lot better lately. How far does … Read more

These days AI comes up everywhere. Everyone else seems to have it figured out, and you’re left wondering what you’re actually supposed to do with it. That feeling is fair, and it’s more common than you’d think. Here’s the short version: there’s nothing to study first. You just ask, the way you’d text a friend … Read more

You can build a small program without writing a single line of code. You describe what you want in plain words, and an AI writes the code for you. People call this vibe coding. I used it to make a little dice game, and I dropped it right into this post. Press the button below … Read more