1 Year Later

Ian Wootten

07 Sep 2025 — 3 min read

No, this isn't the title of the latest in a Danny Boyle series.

It's been a while since my last update. In fact, it's been over a year! Sorry about that - but I've been pretty busy. The contract work I started back in January of 2024 grew into a role leading the development of a main product offering for longform.ai leaving little time to think about much else. It's been a fun ride, but sadly my public output has suffered, with few updates over that time, save for twitter and bluesky.

Over that time, I enjoyed working closely with the founders and picking the stack we went with, often rapidly adopting new models and changing tools as they got released. I got to dive deep into making APIs with postgREST, loving it so much to publish a video on it. That work came to end fairly recently, which leaves some room for updates.

So much has happened in that time in the dev world. MCP became a thing and agentic ai is now all the rage. You'd be forgiven that everyone vibe codes apps instead of hiring devs now. I've been playing with it all, more recently rapidly prototyping personal apps through Claude Code and loving how quickly things seem to come together. Lets hope I never have to maintain it though.

Anyway, with all that said I have a great collection of links for you today. Enjoy!

Ian

Articles

Vibe code is legacy code

We all seem to have missed the point with vibe coding. It was never coined by Andrej to be used by to be used in production apps. Steve Krouse from val.town summarises where it all went wrong.

I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code

In a polar opposite vein, Indragie from Sentry explains how he built an app entirely with Claude Code and some tips for engineers who are looking to do the same.

How to Deploy a Next.js App to Cloud Flare Workers

I recently tried to deploy a Next.js app to Cloudflare workers with full CI/CD and it was a frustrating experience. Here's a TLDR of everything I learned in the process.

Introducing the DigitalOcean MCP Server

You can now ask your LLM of choice to create the infrastructure you need. I tested this out myself but coming from terraform, can only really see it being useful in places where you only need to test things out or create that infra once.

Code

A Funny Tweet

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Launching a Transcription API

I launched despeech.com last month. It's a dead simple transcription API service that allows you to download and transcribe audio by posting a URL. Getting easy access to GPUs for transcription was one of the pain points I had when working with audio data in my last

Slow Success

This week Supabase held their first ever select conference in San Francisco. It was stuffed with incredible speakers and developers. The whole event is up on youtube so you can watch through if you didn't attend. It's incredible to see how far Supabase has come since

The Beauty of Remote Work

I recently returned from a working holiday. I spent a few days away with the family experiencing some very beautiful farm views whilst housesitting in Herefordshire. Even though I was away I was still able to work, all whilst I and the family got to enjoy the sights and sounds

Quit Worrying, Do Something

This month we've seen so much activity from different providers bringing out new AI tools. I got to play with groq - a provider capable of crazy speeds of over 500 tokens/s, Anthropic have just dropped Claude 3 which some have mistaken for AGI and the team