v3: let's be prompt engineers

📍 Brighton, 🇬🇧 

TL;DR

• I touched some grass, spent some great time with the family outdoor

• I like Apple Pay more

• Azure EntraID is THE shit

• SPAs are dead

• So is prompt engineering (as a job title)

Top story of this week is that the weather is nice in London, and those who live in the UK know that good weather is always newsworthy. So, we had a nice weekend in London, went for a walk, and spent some quality family time.

Also, it’s mandatory to have a pint in nice weather when you’re out. 🍺

Speaking of, it cost me £30 for 4 drinks. Is that the new normal? I miss the days when a pint was 5 quid.

Another great thing I’ve learned this week is that you shouldn’t be afraid to be wrong. You just need to “keep it real” and be reasonable. This can open new opportunities for you (that is, if you’re in a good company, not in a toxic hell hole).

My manager told me that he put me on the project because he thought that I’m opinionated and yet objective. I have my own opinions and how things should be done, but at the same time, I’m open to other ideas, ready to listen to other points of view, and accept them if they’re better than mine.

And I am like that! I love learning from other people. I do have opinions, I have formed them over my career, but I do realise that I can’t know everything, and I can definitely be wrong about things!

So, there is nothing wrong with having strong opinions, as long as you’re open to being corrected.

Random thought, I always pay with Apple Pay for things, including that beer. Ever thought about how Apple and Google systems work? There is a difference. 👇

Essentially, Apple’s model sounds more secure, while Google can afford more features. What do you prefer?

It’s a trade-off, as always.

It’s not a secret, I do projects on the side sometimes. Sometimes they’re pet projects, sometimes they’re paid.

Recently, I wanted to start a small React project. All I needed was a front-end client side and a tiny API back-end.

I thought I’d do hono.dev in the back and an SPA with React on the front, you know, the old school way.

How do I start? I realised that there isn’t really a “go-to” stack/setup for client-side SPA React projects anymore, like there is for Next.js. And I don’t want Next.js, it would be too much for my case.

What do I go with? React Router? Well, that’s now Remix. I mean, Remix is now React Router. So, that’s full stack. And if you want to do it in SPA mode, then there’s boilerplate to make that work.

I don’t want to do all this work, even if it didn’t seem like much.

Is Reach Router still a thing? Haven’t heard from them since 2021. Their last release was 5 years ago! 😱 

I’m not using Svelte. Even though I only need very basic functionality with some Azure EntraID, but even that turns out hard in Svelte. Ecosystem is still not there, and it’s been a long time now!

And libraries like better-auth, they do have Svelte and other adapters, but again, those are for SvelteKit, which is full-stack-ish and it’s unofficial/still wip/raw. That’s a no.

Well, fuck.

I’m not doing Vue. Can’t be bothered.

I ended up with Astro. Not complaining, I love Astro. But I also wanted it to be simpler without me having to set up auth on the back-end.

I guess this is simple today. 🤷

BTW, that side project, I was vibe coding it.

In my defence, I wasn’t vibe coding in the “early”/”classical” definition of the term. I was going step by step, instructing AI to write specific lines, use npm modules that I chose, and formatting and structuring things in the way I want.

So, in a way, AI was just templating for me. And the project went impressively fast!

I always hated the templating part of the job, i.e., you knew what things should go where, you just had to tediously enter one character after another to achieve that.

Does that make me a prompt engineer?

What happened to all prompt engineers, by the way? Where did they all go? Have we finally realised that a fraction of a job can’t be a separate profession? I mean, for the same reason we’re not having RegEx Engineers, even though there is a separate book about it too.

About EntraID.

I’ve been working with Azure EntraID a lot lately at work and in my side projects.

I’m really enjoying it. I used to think, and still do most of the time, that “big cloud”, AWS, Azure, their products are overly complicated, which has some truth in it, because why would companies like Vercel and Netlify have so much success then?

Meaning, if you wanna do something simple, deploy fast, and not spend hours debugging it, then look elsewhere, Clerk.dev, Render, etc.

But EntraID, in combination with an auth library like better-auth (l, is really easy to set up and gives you so much control over things!

Your users would need to log in with a Microsoft account, though.

So, what else happened…

GSAP is now free, which isn’t really, it’s just that Webflow is paying the bill.

Anyone ever used it? I found myself working with Lottie more often.

Then React had a “big update”, where ViewTransition excited me the most. Astro, Vue, they all had it for a while now. React was behind!

PS, I’m still waiting for that Rap Video that ThePrimeagen and co. were recording while at React Miami.

They were having so much fun there, seemed like such an exclusive party! Makes me wanna buy those Early Bird tickets for the 2026 event! I just can’t plan for that long, such long-term planning doesn’t fit my lifestyle. 😂

🎓️ Top Learning Materials of the Week

💬 v0 Prompt Engineering Guide - a training offered to Sainsbury’s by Vercel. This is some INSIDER shit, you won’t get it anywhere else! 😄 

⚒️ Tools of the Week

📈 Drizzle ORM - after working with it this week, this has become my favourite ORM! Give it a go, see how easy it is to setup a Postgres DB, create schema and do migrations in particularly! 🔥🔥