Nicholas C. Zakas

I'm excited to share my first new book (or e-book) in over five years! Understanding JavaScript Promises explains not just how promises work but also how to use them in the real world. And the best part? It's free. Grab yours now. bit.ly/promises-ebook

The ESLint TSC just finalized our plans for v10.0.0: github.com/orgs/eslint/pr…

Using the GitHub MCP server, you can ask a model to summarize an issue and leave a comment with the summary. Here's my prompt: gist.github.com/nzakas/0699100…

The more I use Tailwind v4, the more impressed I am by how they eliminated as much JavaScript as possible in favor of CSS-based solutions. It makes things hard on LLMs that don't yet understand this, but it's definitely a better developer experience.

As I continue working on Bredbox (my Pocket clone), I used GPT-4.1 Beast Mode to implement microdata extraction by feeding it this URL: html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/micr… It came out with just one bug on nested microdata objects. Pretty impressive.

I am the current maintainer of Stylus. The Stylus library has been flagged as malicious lib, which has caused many lib and frameworks that depend on Stylus to fail to install. Please help me retweet this msg in the hope that the npmjs official team will take notice of this issue

I found GPT-4.1 Beast Mode a little too aggressive, so I came up with a gentler alternative that gives me some good results: Thinking Cap Mode! Encourages 4.1 to be a bit more thoughtful: gist.github.com/nzakas/198d6b7…

Tip: @cline is a free, best-in-class AI coding assistant for @code! It's designed for engineers who value unrestricted access to frontier AI models and comprehensive codebase understanding. On its one year anniversary, it's still my AI-coding tool of choice, with many fans at…

Really cool GitHub Models use case from @slicknet that's especially helpful for OSS maintainers - Given a GitHub repository and release, it creates a social post summarizing the key changes and improvements: lnkd.in/g5Rngv_u

TIL You can define alt text for Open Graph images: stefanjudis.com/today-i-learne…

Here's a tip of coercing GPT-4.1 to do better: Use the phrase "think deeply" with any request, such as "think deeply about how to solve this problem." This triggers 4.1 to come up with a plan first.

Claude is still tops in responses to "make this look prettier" to improve web page designs.

I've been saying this for a while: a third-party cloud service is not a safe place for important data. Whether that's Gmail, Dropbox, or GitHub, you need a backup solution. I wrote about mine a while back: humanwhocodes.com/blog/2024/04/b…

What do y'all use to contain the mess of cords off the back of your desk? This rat's nest is starting to get to me.

Whatever the Copilot folks did in this latest release of VS Code to make GPT-4.1 better really worked. It's a lot more useful that before.

I was recently on the JS Craft podcast where we talked about the intersection of AI and JavaScript, AI-assisted programming, career longevity in software engineering, and much more. js-craft.io/blog/nicholas-…

It's worth the time to set up custom instructions for VS Code Copilot on a per-file-type basis. The output is so much better the first time around.

Super excited to share my interview with @slicknet! We talked about: - AI assisted development - MCP - JavaScript vs. Python for AI integration - Building a long-lasting career as a software dev - The importance of writing well in the age of LLMs 👉 js-craft.io/blog/nicholas-…

This was the Copilot agent-written PR that ate my premium requests.

I'm probably dating myself here, but bouncing back and forth between included and premium AI models in VS Code reminds me a lot of bouncing back and forth between free and paid areas of AOL back in the day.

Damn, Copilot agent used up all my premium requests for the month before they changed the policy to just one per premium request per session. 😭