Notes on .NET, XAF, and building things
Twenty years of XPO, application frameworks, and lately a lot of applied AI. 291 articles and counting.
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There's No ADB for iPhone: Automating React Native UI Tests on Real iOS Devices
If you come from Android like I do, you have a comfortable habit: plug in a device, talk to it over adb, script everything. So the natural question when you ship the iOS side of a React Native app is — can I do the same on a physical iPhone? The short answer is yes, but. And the 'but' lands squarely on the thing I care about most: running on a real device instead of a simulator.
Speech-to-Text in React Native: Four Ways to Reach Android Parity
My React Native app transcribes voice on iOS just fine — Apple hands you a recognizer and you're done. Then I went to reach parity on Android and found the usual mobile story: the easy path exists, but it's a different easy path, with different tradeoffs. Here are the four routes I weighed, and the two questions that actually decide which one you pick.
You Don't Need a GPU for Speech: Self-Hosting Whisper and TTS on a CPU VPS
The reflex when someone says 'speech-to-text' or 'text-to-speech' is to reach for a GPU. For real-time voice on a server, you mostly don't need one. The thing that actually makes CPU speech fast isn't CUDA — it's a set of instruction sets your cheap VPS already has. Here's how I run both transcription and synthesis on a plain CPU box, always-on, with no API keys and no GPU bill.
FOMO, JOMO, and FOWT — The Fear of Wasted Tokens
I pay for the max plans — Codex and Claude Code — plus a monthly Azure token allotment. Here's the thing nobody warns you about: those are monthly quotas. Use them or lose them. And I've caught myself genuinely afraid to oversleep or take a day trip, because that's quota I'll never get back. That feeling needed a name, so I gave it one: FOWT, the Fear Of Wasted Tokens.
What Is Token Maxxing? Spending Compute to Buy Correctness
There's a piece of slang making the rounds in the AI dev world: token maxxing. Strip away the meme and it names something real — the deliberate choice to spend more tokens on a problem because tokens have become the cheapest thing you can throw at it. Here's what it actually means, when it works, and when you're just lighting money on fire.
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The Vision Model That Wasn't There: DeepSeek V4, a Vanished Paper, and a Recipe You Can Use Today
I set out to wire DeepSeek V4's much-described image-understanding into a side project — the model that 'calculates bounding boxes and relative dimensions step by step.' One problem: DeepSeek V4 can't see images at all. This is the detective story of how I found that out three different ways, the vanished research paper that explains where the claim came from, and the lesson that mattered most — a method is portable even when a model isn't. So I ported the recipe to Gemini and measured it.
What Is OpenAI Codex Sites? Prompt-to-Hosted-App, With a Catch
OpenAI's Codex picked up a feature called Sites: describe an app in plain language and Codex builds it, runs it, deploys it, and hands you back a live hosted URL — no deploy pipeline of your own. It's a genuinely interesting glimpse of where agents are heading. It also ships with some walls worth knowing about before you get excited. Here's the honest rundown.
LM Studio 0.4.16: Your Local Models Just Went Mobile
LM Studio is the app I reach for whenever I want to run a model on my own hardware, and the 0.4.16 release adds the thing I didn't know I wanted: a mobile app called Locally that lets me drive my big desktop models from my phone over LM Link. Here's what's new, and why this is a bigger deal than a point release sounds.
Static Analyzers: How They Work and Why You Actually Need Them
A static analyzer reads your code without running it and tells you what's wrong — the bug you didn't see, the await you forgot, the disposable you leaked. After twenty years of .NET I treat them as non-negotiable. Here's what they actually are, how they work under the hood (with a peek at Roslyn), and why every serious project should have them turned on and turned up.
What Is ACP? The Agent Client Protocol — LSP, but for AI Coding Agents
If you've watched the AI coding space lately, you've heard about MCP. Its quieter cousin is ACP — the Agent Client Protocol — and it solves a different problem: not how an agent talks to its tools, but how your editor talks to the agent. The one-line version: if MCP is USB-C for AI tools, ACP is LSP for AI agents. Here's what it is and why I think it matters.