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One Week with Zed: I Think I Will Keep It

VS Code has been my daily driver for a good while. What I genuinely like about it is the extension support: Excalidraw, draw.io, Remote - SSH, Prettier, and GitLens are the ones I use most. It is a great tool for a wide range of tasks, but I have found Zed to be a better fit for my workflow. I started using Zed a week ago and I am still using it.

Startup: It Opens Fast!

A fresh install of VS Code takes a longer time to open, while Zed opens instantly. Is it because Zed is written in Rust?

Hermes Agent Is the One That Actually Gets Work Done

I have not written here for a good while. A lot happened in between. A series of events shifted my whole trajectory, and I moved back to Indonesia after almost a decade abroad. I decided to stay and work here, in my home country.

Anyway, back to what this post is about :)

For a long time, generative AI meant one thing to me: open a chat window, type a question, copy the answer, paste it somewhere else, repeat. ChatGPT answered questions well. Claude wrote code blocks nicely. But neither one ever closed the loop. They never ran the terminal command, never edited the file, never scheduled a job, never remembered what I was working on last Tuesday. They answered. I did the rest.

I first tried Hermes Agent after seeing it on X (Twitter). A couple of AI influencers I follow were posting screenshots of terminal sessions where the agent was running full research pipelines and editing code while they did something else. I installed it that evening. Two weeks later, I stopped opening my browser chat tabs entirely.

  • 3 min read

So, am I the only one who just discovered this great product? I came across Exa.ai when it was mentioned a few times on X, and I've been using it for a couple of months now. I'm quite satisfied with my experience.

If you're a longtime user of Google or someone exploring newer AI tools like Perplexity, Exa feels refreshingly different right away. Stacking it up against Perplexity, the two serve distinct purposes: Perplexity excels at synthesizing answers with sources and citations for quick research, while Exa delves deeper into semantic understanding to surface pages that truly align with your intent.

  • 4 min read

Leaving Notion Behind: Why Notesnook Became My Go-To for Simple, Private Notes

A year ago, I was a dedicated Notion user, relying on it to manage my notes, tasks, and ideas. Its all-in-one workspace promised endless possibilities-databases, wikis, Kanban boards, you name it. However, as time went on, I realized that Notion's complexity was more of a hindrance. I often spent countless hours on customizing the layouts instead of populating them with my ideas 😄 Notion is incredibly powerful and its versatility is amazing. For simple tasks - at least for my use cases - it felt like overkill. My Notion pages turned into elaborate dashboards when all I really wanted was a simple place to jot down thoughts.

I came across Notesnook on PrivacyGuides while researching other secure alternatives.

  • 2 min read

Deploying a Fully Free AI Coding Assistant on Windows with VS Code, Cline, and OpenRouter.ai

I’ve been experimenting with AI-powered tools to build quick prototypes and streamline my Windows-based workflow. So far, the best free stack that works for me is VS Code + Cline + OpenRouter.ai.

For this guide I’m using Qwen3 - 235B A22B (Free)—released just a few days ago—as my default model. Note: this model supports text input/output only.