- Gemini CLI
- OpenAI codex CLI
- VSCode Copilot Chat
- Github Spark (not really open sourced. Reverse engineered, then later confirmed to be true.)
Sunday, August 10, 2025
AI dev tools August 2025 update
Sunday, March 30, 2025
AI dev tools that I use in March 2025
It's 2025, and LLM-based developer tools have become mainstream, not a novelty. I've been gradually using these tools for coding tasks outside of work. I enjoy using them in two popular ways: for vibe coding, which is all about those fun, low-stakes projects, and in responsible AI-assisted programming. In that latter setting, I take the time to review every line of code it generates, as I have higher security and quality requirements for certain tasks.
Here are the tools I commonly use these days:
- Co-pilot chat in VS Code: I use it mostly to ask questions about the code base I have open in the editor and for general technical questions regarding the task at hand. Inline chat by highlighting code snippets or adding @workspace as context to the chat works well with my flow. The 50 chat requests/month on the free plan are enough for me. Although it comes with access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models, I'm mostly sticking to GPT-4o here.
- Cline: This is one of the first VS code extensions I tried for AI-assistance, and I liked it enough to stick with it. There are a few features I enjoy most in Cline:
- The separation of plan/act modes helps me to mentally track the progress of the task.
- The pane showing token costs helps to track the API costs in dollars as well as tokens.
- The diff view clearly shows the proposed changes, so I can approve/disapprove as needed. After the task is completed, I will have a sense of which files of the code base were modified.
- Claude code: It was somewhat surprising to see a big model provider like Anthropic getting into the application layer by providing an agentic CLI tool for development tasks. I'm sure they have some good reasons to build a CLI tool without going on the IDE extension route like the others. The installation, setting up, and working with it were very smooth. I like that they keep adding new features to it.
- repomix and llm tool: I use this combination to understand code bases I'm delving into for the first time. I use repomix to first generate an LLM-friendly representation of the code base and then ask LLM to generate an architecture summary of the repo like this: cat repomix-output.xml | llm -m gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 -s 'this file contains all the files in the repository combined into one. provide architectural overview as markdown' | tee architecture.md
Based on the number of input tokens sent to the model, I can clearly see that Cline is a bit more verbose in its prompts than Claude Code. But I guess the additional context helps because I noticed Cline was slightly better when handling complex tasks. So my usage pattern is to first try the task with Claude Code and, if it fails, throw away the generated code to start from scratch with Cline.
In terms of the models, I've moved from Claude 3.5 to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and I'm paying for the API tokens as needed. Based on some quick experiments via their web interface, I'm also considering moving to Gemini 2.5 Pro (gemini-2.
Tools that I want to start using more:
- OpenHands: I've heard a lot of good things about it since OpenDevin, but I didn't get the time to try it out.
- Zed: With me trying out Rust development, I wanted to use Zed for my development with all the hype surrounding it. But I could not get into the flow with it.
- Warp: Same as with Zed, Warp sounded amazing on paper. But I kept going back to the plain old terminal. I should give this another chance.
- files-to-prompt: I want to use it instead of repomix, but could not get it to work with UV.
- Cursor, Windsurf, and others: Cline is working well for me for now, but I should try these out to see what's new with them.
- Ollama: I'm eager to integrate all my tools with a locally hosted model! Unfortunately, the models I've found so far for my hardware (MacBook Air M3 16GB) haven't quite met my needs for coding tasks. I'm really looking forward to that amazing future. If you have any suggestions for models that would work well for me, I'd love to hear them!
PS: I also use Grammarly Premium. I thought I would include it in dev tools because I write a lot in English while coding (in code comments and documentation, and these days, mostly as prompts to the LLMs). So, grammar and spell checking all of this prose is important.
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Playing Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on Steamdeck
Due to this game using Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) and EAC having limited support for Linux, the game does not work out-of-the-box on the Steamdeck. Here are the tweaks I had to do to get it to work. Before diving in, make sure to read the note at the very end of this post about preserving settings.
- Delete Vermintide 2 compatdata directory (It's here: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/552500)
- Do 'Verify game files' using the Steam client
- Delete WebView2Loader.dll and MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe. ( By default they are both here: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Warhammer Vermintide 2/launcher. But the location is slightly different if you have installed the game on an SD card. You can find the exact location using Browse local files option in the Steam client. See the screenshot below.)

- Then run the game!
Note: The user settings and game saves are at the following locations. Back them up before deleting the compactdata directory if you don't want to lose them.
- .../steamapps/compatdata/552500/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Fatshark/Vermintide\ 2/user_settings.config
- ../steamapps/compatdata/552500/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Fatshark/Vermintide\ 2/save_data.sav
Monday, February 20, 2023
Fixing SteamDeck Warframe installation (missing executable) error
When I tried installing Warframe on SteamDeck, I encountered this problem. It appeared to download several GBs of content for some time and run Vulcan shaders. However, when the installation finished, the game didn't launch.
When I checked the game directory (~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Warframe/) it was empty. When the game was launched in Desktop mode, it complained ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Warframe/Tools/launcher.exe was missing. (Of course, because the directory is empty.)
Here's how I fixed it and got Warframe to work on SteamDeck:
I added the game to my library on Epic Games Store. Then, downloaded Warframe using the Heroic Games Launcher. But note that I didn't launch it. (I wanted to run the steam version of the game, not Epic version). Heroic had downloaded several MBs and now there was a Warframe.zip inside ~/Games/Heroic/Warframe/. I then extracted that zip into ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Warframe/. Voila! now there's tools/launcher.exe. When you launch the game on Steam now it will start.
The game is very optimized. It ran smoothly. The only minor annoyance is that I have to log in to Warframe account in the launcher every time.
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Some Tips and Tricks for the Steam Deck
Steam Deck is a remarkable device. In the last few months, I had a delightful time clearing up the backlog of games I had in my Steam library, Epic Games store, EA, and Ubisoft. There were times when I encountered issues, however, and here are some valuable tools that I used to customize the Steam Deck in various ways. I will keep updating the following list as I come across new ones along the way.
How to play non-steam games
For Epic Games and GOG, I had success using Heroic Games Launcher. I heard some positive reviews about Lutris as well. For EA and Ubisoft games, I use the Origin Launcher and Ubisoft Launcher respectively.
Where to find the Origin installer
Since SteamOS is Linux-based the EA website doesn't allow downloading the Origin client from the web browser on Steam. However, you can directly download the original windows client hosted on EA Origin servers from here: https://www.dm.origin.com/download. (Don't use the installers hosted on websites not affiliated with EA Origin due to security risks.)
P.S. EA has now introduced a revamped EA app which can be found here and recommends using it instead.
How to add non-steam game shortcuts to Steam game mode
Heroic Bash Launcher: Works for games that are installed with Heroic Games Launcher. This needs some command-line experience but conveniently takes care of downloading artwork for the shortcuts as well.
BoilR: Supports multiple game platforms (not only Heroic) but requires a little tweaking to get the artwork downloading to work. (i.e. by adding a SteamGridDB API key)
How to add custom artwork for non-steam games
If you didn't get custom artwork automatically added using the above tools, you can use SteamGridDB in conjunction with the SGDBoop tool. If SGDBoop is not working based on their instructions, you may have to run this command: systemctl restart --user xdg-desktop-portal
Other miscellaneous tips and tricks
- One of the disadvantages of playing non-steam games over steam games is that non-steam games do not automatically download pre-compiled shader caches. However, to prevent non-steam games from lagging too far behind while shader caches are being compiled during games, you can use the DXVK_ASYNC=1 launcher option.
- If you are concerned about shader caches taking too much space on the Steam Deck (as observed by the growth of the Other section in storage settings) use shader cache killer to selectively delete the cache directories that are no longer needed.
- Install ProtonUp-Qt to manage multiple versions of Wine and Proton as needed by different games
- Install Protontricks to further tweak Proton and install additional libraries required by certain games
- Install Flatseal to manage Flatpak permissions (e.g., for installing non-steam games to the microSD card)
- Check out the very helpful r/steamdeck subreddit if you need help with other steam deck issues.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Rooting Lenovo TAB 2 A7-20F on Linux
In terms of specs, this comes with Android 4.4 (KitKat) and a Mediatek MT8127 chipset. Not stellar specs, but decent enough to get some work done. For rooting this, I was primarily looking for a way to do it using just a Linux laptop and a USB cable. So here are the steps I followed:
- Do a hard reset of the tablet
- For this, you need to restart the device to Bootloader by holding Volume up + Power keys when the tablet is starting. Then you'll come to this menu in Chinese.

Chinese Bootloader menu of Lenovo TAB2 A7-20F - Here you need to select the clear eMMC (清除 eMMC) option by navigating to it via volume down key and selecting it via the power key.
- Download SP Flash Tool for Linux from here.
- Then follow the steps in this XDA thread to install TWRP. (You'll have to run SP Flash Tool with root privileges.)
- Copy the SuperSU zip to the tablet via USB.
- Reboot the table to recovery mode by holding Volume up + Volume Down + Power keys when the tablet is starting. This should boot to TWRP.
- Take a back up of system, data, and boot partitions via TWRP, just in case if you need to restore the stock ROM in the future.
- While inside TWRP, install SuperSU by going to 'Install' -> 'Install ZIP' and selecting the copied SuperSU zip.
- Now when you boot into the normal mode, you'll see SuperSU has been installed.
- You can verify it by opening a terminal and typing su.
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| Success! Root access in Tab2 A7-20F |
Here are some other threads if you plan on going beyond the new ROM and installing a new one.
- https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/development/rom-stock-lollipop-5-0-roms-lenovo-tab2-t3418835
- https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/software/cyanogenmod-12-1-lenovo-tab2-a7-10f-t3478841
Friday, January 26, 2018
Using Office365 Mail and Calendar in Linux
Step 1: First install the software needed.
sudo apt-get install evolution evolution-ews
Step 2: (Optional) If you are not using a GNOME-based Desktop Enivronment you need to install following dependencies as well. (For example, I'm using XFCE with i3WM)
sudo apt-get install gnome-online-accounts gnome-control-center
Step 3: Then start the gnome-contol-center. If you're not on GNOME, you might have to trick the Desktop to make it believe you're on GNOME like this:
env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME gnome-control-center
Step 4: Click on Online Accounts and add your Microsoft Exchange details. (Here use outlook.office365.com as the server.)
Step 5: Go to Evolution. Add an identity.
Step 6: In Receiving e-mail section, use https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx as the Host URL. Then when you click the Fetch URL button, OAB URL should be auto-completed.
Step 7: Once you restart, everything should be synced.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Weather info in i3bar with i3status
Update: wttr.in now has a new one line format. So some of the below logic for parsing the output is no longer required.
I wanted a simple solution that does not require installing an external program like i3blocks, conky, dzen2, xmobar or lemonbar. It had to also preserve colors I had configured for the i3bar output. So I came up with this simple solution.
Step 1: Setup a cron job to retrieve weather information every 5 minutes and store it in a temporary file. (This is because wttr.in only allows 1000 API calls per day and the weather information is not frequently updated in the server.)
*/5 * * * * curl -s wttr.in/montreal?T | head -n 7 > ~/.weather.cache
Step 2: Write a shell script to add this information to i3status data.
Step 3: The ~/.config/i3/config file needs to be updated for the status_command to pipe through this script, as follows.
bar {
status_command .config/i3/weather.sh
tray_output primary
}
Step 4: The ~/.i3status.conf file should also be updated to change the output to the JSON format.
general {
output_format = "i3bar"
colors = true
interval = 5
}
This is how it looks like in the end.
You can find more information from the following links.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Few tips on tweaking Elementary OS for Crouton
Activating Reverse Scrolling
If you're a fan of reverse scrolling (or natural scrolling as some people call it) in Mac OS X, you can activate the same in Elementary OS by going to System Settings > Tweaks > General > Miscellaneous, and turn on Natural Scrolling. But I noticed in Elementary OS Luna for crouton, that setting resets to false after restarting. You can fix it by adding the following command as a startup application (System Settings > Startup Applications > Add)
/usr/lib/plugs/pantheon/tweaks/natural_scrolling.sh true
Getting back the minimize button
Method 1: Start dconf-editor and go to org > pantheon > desktop > gala > appearance and change "button layout" to re-order buttons in the window decoration. Eg: "menu:minimize,maximize,close"
Method 2: Run the following command.
gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string ":minimize:maximize:close"
Note: To install dconf-editor use the command:
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
To install elementary-tweaks use the command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mpstark/elementary-tweaks-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Crawljax gets a face lift. Web UI in Crawljax 3.5
To run it, simply unzip the web distribution archive and run the command java -jar crawljax-web-3.5-SNAPSHOT.jar. You can customize the port and output directory using -p and -o arguments. Here are some screen-shots of the web interface in action. More usage tutorials will follow.
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| Crawljax Web UI Home - You can start by adding a 'New Configuration' as shown |
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| 'Edit Configuration' Page |
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| 'Add Plugin' Page |
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| Crawl status log with real-time updates |
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| Output of the Crawl Overview plugin |
Related links
Friday, January 24, 2014
Set svn to ignore auxiliary LaTeX files globally
svn status complain about them, you can add those patterns to the global-ignores property in your ~/.subversion/config file (or "%APPDATA%\Subversion\config" on Windows).If you just want to set it for one repository, you can use
svn propedit svn:ignore . or svn propset as explained here.PS: Read Configuration Area Layout in the red bean book or this SO question for more information.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
tcsh/csh tips for the bash user
- You can check the type of shell you are using by the commands echo $shell or echo $0
Note: $0 is actually the name of the running process. It will return the name of the shell or shell script according to the context. Read more on that here: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/othertypesv.html# CHILDREF2
- You can get a list of all the shells installed on your system by typing
cat /etc/shells
- ..and also change the default one to a different shell (if you have the permissions) using the command chsh.
- If you are moving from bash to tcsh, you will find your .bashrc file (or even .bash_profile, .profile) doesn't work anymore. It's the ~/.cshrc file in tcsh instead. And for setting environment variables, rather than the old command.. PATH= $PATH:$HOME/bin; export PATH you will have to use something like..
setenv PATH ${PATH}:${HOME}/binNote the missing '='.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Region & time zone settings in Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon
Display available time zone options:
timedatectl list-timezonesSet the time zone:
timedatectl set-timezoneOr you can just use..
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Sunday, June 30, 2013
[Quick Tip] BPEL Correlation, Load tests in soapUI and Groovy
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Namespaces in E4X
Related Links:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/E4X/Processing_XML_with_E4X
http://www.taval.de/publications/INPROC-2009-25/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/922668/e4x-grab-nodes-with-namespaces
Friday, May 3, 2013
Few tips to setup a Linux UPnP/DLNA Media Server for iPad
..or ffmpeg
In AVI/MKV files, sometimes there are AVI files with 2 audio streams, the first and default track is not in your preferred language, but the second track is. This causes problems when you view it in a player that does not support multiple audio tracks. Here's how to delete the unwanted audio tracks and making one the default audio, using the MKVtoolnix package.
First, get the audio track info so we know which one to keep.
mkvmerge -i input.mkv
Then copy only selected audio tracks to the new file with --atracks option. Here 2 is the Audio Track ID we need to keep.
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --atracks 3 input.mkv
My preferred Media Server is MediaTomb.
mediatomb -e wlan0
Here I have used the wireless network interface to bind to, so all the other devices on the Home WiFi can connect to this server.
It also supports transcoding to perform format conversion of your content on the fly allowing you to view media that is otherwise not supported by your player. If you like to go ahead with tinkering the configuration, find it here: ~/.mediatomb/config.xml and change 'no' to 'yes' on the '<transcoding enabled="no">' line. But for mediatomb and iOS devices it's hard to find the right configuration for live transcoding. So I'm sticking to the above manual conversion.
Sources:
http://superuser.com/a/77582/52620
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MKVtoolnix
http://www.techradar.com/news/digital-home/media-servers/build-a-transcoding-upnp-media-server-923345
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
How to use Hibernate as the persistence layer for Apache ODE/WSO2 BPS
By default, Apache ODE/WSO2 BPS uses OpenJPA as the persistence layer, but also includes implementation for Hibernate as well. For switching to Hibernate add the following system propety. (For WSO2 BPS you can do it via $CARBON_HOME/bin/wso2server.sh)
-Dode.persistence=hibernate \
Make sure you have copied the required Hibernate jar to $CARBON_HOME/repository/components/lib directory.
If you are getting errors at server start up, check whether the necessary tables have been automatically created by Hibernate. If not, you can use a script to manually create the tables (similar to the following used for MySQL DB) Note Hibernate has slightly different database schemas and also uses "BPEL_" prefix in table names instead of "ODE_" prefix.
If you are using a DB other than Apache Derby, H2, MySQL or Oracle, and having trouble resolving the DB dialect from the database product name, you can manually set the HIBERNATE_DIALECT in org.apache.ode.daohib.bpel.BpelDAOConnectionFactoryImpl class. For implementation details see dao-hibernate and dao-hibernate-db modules in Apache ODE source.
Related discusson on "Switch to the hibernate DAO layer" mail thread.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
ReplyTo header in Unified Endpoint configuration of WSO2 BPS
You can refer to this config file (locatd in registry or in the file system) as follows, inside the deploy.xml file:
There are other use cases of UEP like adding QOS, Security etc. You can read more on that here.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Use of 'DynamicImport-Package: *' in OSGi
'DynamicImport-Package: *' is a trick used by bundles to allow importing client packages which are not known during bundle build time, in addition to its own dependencies, to prevent ClassNotFoundException issues. [i.e. If there are classes which have Class.forName (or other dynamic look up)] This turns OSGi Framework into a very expensive class path for the packages involved and breaks the concept of versions in OSGi. Use of this attribute is said to be a sign of a non-modular design and it might be a good time to revisit the architecture.
To learn more:
- DynamicImport-Package - OSGi Community Wiki http://wiki.osgi.org/wiki/DynamicImport-Package
- What is the difference between bootdelegation and DynamicImport-Package in osgi http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14729568/what-is-the-difference-between-bootdelegation-and-dynamicimport-package-in-osgi
- If code uses Class.forName (e.g. hibernate) consider DynamicImport-Package https://github.com/bndtools/bnd/issues/80
Monday, February 11, 2013
How to make use of WS-Addressing ReplyTo header in an Asynchronus BPEL Process
In Apache ODE or WSO2 BPS, if you are looking for a way to asynchronously call back from a BPEL process, after the process is finished, to an reply address dynamically provided in the Request Message with WS-Addressing
You can read more here about Using WS-Addressing in SOAP UI
Hat-tip: From Apache ODE mail archives, Related question from StackOverflow







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