On Vibe Coding, AI Agents & Dev Tools
The best in dev tools from Jan to Mar 2025 — no fluff
Welcome Back to ByteSizedBets
Hey everyone,
First, I want to say sorry for the radio silence these past few months.
Between an increasing workload and shifting priorities, newsletter took a backseat—but that's about to change.
I'm excited to announce that ByteSizedBets is pivoting to focus exclusively on developer tools.
Every month, you'll receive a carefully curated collection of the best tech content from across the internet, designed to be consumed in 5-8 minutes.
No fluff, just most valuable insights, tools, and resources that can immediately impact your daily workflow and productivity as a developer and founder.
Thank you for sticking with me during this transition.
Let’s get started and see what happened in developer tools in Q1 2025 (Jan- Mar).
What is Vibe Coding? How Creators Can Build Software Without Writing Code
— Jacob Anderson
tl;dr: Forget Python, forget drag-and-drop – 2025 is all about vibe coding.
Coined by AI legend Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding is a chill, no-keyboard-required approach where creators describe what they want and let AI tools build the actual software.
In this hands-on guide, Jacob Anderson walks us through how he used Replit’s AI Agent and tools like SuperWhisper to build a full podcast script timer – no code, just vibes.
With step-by-step iterations ("Make it colorful", "Add a PDF export button", "Serif fonts, please"), the AI adjusts in real-time based on natural language feedback.
Jacob argues this shift is a game-changer for creators who have brilliant tool ideas but zero coding experience.
Whether you're making tools for your audience, internal workflows, or new income streams, vibe coding offers the fastest on-ramp to launching software – and all you need is your voice and vision.
There is a 2025 Vibe Coding Game Jam also happening live on X formerly Twitter.
How to Use Cursor for Large Projects
— Thierry (Founder and CEO of Stream)
tl;dr: While Cursor excels at generating new code, it's also effective for structuring, standardizing, refactoring, and maintaining large codebases.
The productivity boost is incredible - engineers are building software 5-30x faster.
In this blog post - He shared a workflow for using Cursor on large project with approximately 800,000 lines of Go code.
The best part? Engineering roles aren't disappearing - quite the opposite.
They're accelerating hiring for Golang engineers at all levels (lead, staff, director) in Amsterdam, Boulder, and remote positions.
Depending on your skills and experience, you'll either come in at the Lead, Senior or Staff level.
Salary Range: €110,000 to €160,000 EUR depending on Seniority level and location.
Full role description and how to apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/stream
Note - All these roles are open to Amsterdam (relocation and Visa sponsorship available and if you’re good I can refer reply to this email with your resume and why you’re fit for these roles).
Stream powered your app with real-time Chat, Video, Audio, Feeds, and Moderation using Stream’s flexible SDKs. Whether you're building for React, Swift, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, Angular, or Unreal, Stream provides robust APIs and pre-built UI components to get you started fast.
Developer tools
How to Do Thoughtful Code Reviews
— Ankur Tyagi
tl;dr: In this practical guide, I shared my views on code reviews
Why code reviews are important and how they go beyond finding bugs. They help teams grow through empathy, clarity, and shared standards. As teams scale, so does the need for thoughtful and process-driven reviews that avoid the toxic trap of blame culture.
Key takeaways:
Self-review first to catch obvious issues and respect reviewers’ time.
Keep PRs small no one wants to review 1,000+ lines in one sitting.
Give clear, kind feedback, focusing on the code, not the person.
Automate the repetitive stuff with linters and AI agents.
Agree on standards and pass thresholds so reviews feel fair and consistent.
A great code review culture is built not assumed and that culture starts with empathy, ownership, and collaboration.
Productivity & developer tools
AI Agents in 2025: Expectations vs. Reality
– IBM Think Blog
tl;dr: AI agents in 2025 are not quite the self-directed, autonomous collaborators sci-fi promised us–but they’re making serious strides.
This IBM Think article explores the gap between public expectations of AI agents (i.e., intelligent workers who can scope, plan, and execute entire projects independently) and their current reality.
The piece breaks down the types of tasks today’s AI agents are actually good at like automating workflows, extracting insights from data, or handling repetitive decisions and contrasts them with the much harder challenges of managing ambiguity, exercising judgment, or coordinating with other agents unsupervised.
An effective AI agent in 2025 doesn’t replace your team - it amplifies it. But only if you architect the relationship thoughtfully. – IBM Think Blog
Much of the current progress involves combining multiple tools (LLMs, rule engines, RPA) into agentic pipelines rather than relying on a single AI to do it all.
AI Developments
A 10x Faster TypeScript
— Microsoft for Developers
tl;dr: Microsoft is developing a native implementation of TypeScript (in Go) that dramatically improves performance, with benchmark tests showing 9-13x faster compilation times across projects of various sizes.
The new compiler reduces the VS Code codebase compile time from 77.8s to 7.5s and cuts editor project loading from 9.6s to 1.2s while using roughly half the memory.
The JS-based TypeScript will continue as version 6.x while the native implementation will become TypeScript 7.0, with both maintained during the transition period.
A preview capable of command-line typechecking is expected by mid-2025, with feature-complete solution by year-end..
Developer tools
Hardware-Aware Coding: CPU Architecture Concepts Every Developer Should Know
— Abhinav Upadhyay
tl;dr: In "Hardware-Aware Coding," Abinav highlights how understanding the hardware we write code for whether it’s a low-end smartphone, a high-performance server, or an embedded device can lead to better performance and user experience.
He argues that many developers abstract away the physical machine too much, relying on frameworks and cloud platforms without considering how CPU, memory, disk, or network constraints affect performance.
By being mindful of hardware, developers can make more efficient choices, write less wasteful code, and build more responsive software.
How to Implement RBAC in Next.js 15
— Ankur Tyagi
tl;dr: Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Next.js apps streamlines permission management by assigning roles (Viewer, Contributor, Moderator, Admin) rather than individual permissions.
This tutorial builds a Q&A platform using Next.js 15, Clerk for authentication, and Neon, demonstrating how to protect routes with middleware, manage user roles through metadata, and conditionally render UI elements based on permissions.
Developer tools
Five Practical Developer Marketing Tips
— Neevash Ramdial
tl;dr: In 5 Practical Developer Marketing Tips, Nash shares no-nonsense advice for reaching developers effectively.
He emphasizes writing like a developer using clear, technical language engaging in the communities where devs actually hang out (like GitHub or Reddit), treating docs as a key marketing asset, supporting open source sincerely and hiring a developer advocate early to build trust and feedback loops.
Market to developers by respecting how they learn, build, and connect.
Productivity
Enhancing Web Experiences with the View Transitions API
— Jitendra Nirnejak
tl;dr: The View Transitions API lets you create smooth page and DOM transitions with minimal code. no heavy CSS or JS needed.
It’s perfect for adding polish to SPAs and MPAs alike.
Bonus: there's a handy
next-view-transitionspackage for Next.js devs.
That’s a wrap for this edition.
I’d love to hear what you think please reply with feedback, suggestions, or dev tools you’re excited about.
PS: If this new focus on developer tools isn’t your thing, no hard feelings feel free to unsubscribe anytime.