🐝 Hive Five 220 - The Post-Developer Era

Hi friends,

Greetings from the hive!

I treated myself to a belated birthday gift: a refurbished Apple Watch. I already had one but it was acting up.

My main goals for getting it were to track my running experience and boost my overall productivity.

This mostly involves me getting ideas and insights while on a run. To that point, I've found a particularly handy app for taking notes on the go, which I've linked in the productivity section.

On an unrelated note, I've also managed to run every single day this week.

Let's take this week by swarm!

🐝 The Bee's Knees

• Get better results from LLMs: Lee Boonstra's whitepaper teaches effective prompt engineering techniques, from core methods and best practices to advanced automatic/code prompting, helping you achieve more accurate outputs. MORE

• OpenAI Codex CLI is a coding agent that lives in your terminal, letting you run code and manipulate files with chat-driven development. It's like having ChatGPT, but with the power to execute code and manage your repo safely. MORE

• Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs. There’s a lot of hype these days around patterns for building with AI. Agents, memory, RAG, assistants—so many buzzwords! But the reality is, you don’t need fancy techniques or libraries to build useful personal tools with LLMs. MORE

• Flo, the CEO of Lindy.AI, demonstrates how to create AI agents using the Lindy platform to automate various business tasks and act as AI employees. He highlights the speed and ease with which these agents can be set up, suggesting that half of a business's operations can be automated in half a day. MORE

• Learn about Neovim with Maria Solano (ex-Microsoft), a core maintainer! She shares tips on LSP snippets, customizing your editor, and how she contributes to the project. MORE

Interested in sponsoring the Hive Five? Secure your spot.

Table of Contents

• 📰 Updates

• 💼 Work

• 🌎 Community

• 🍄 Level up

• 🛠 Explore

• 📈 Learned something?

📰 Updates

✅ Changelog

• Burp Suite Enterprise Edition is now Burp Suite DAST, a name that clearly reflects its purpose as a top-tier dynamic application security testing solution. MORE

• Lazygit v0.49.0 is here with enhancements like Fish shell support and custom file icons. They've also patched up some bugs, like making sure your commit prefixes work right. MORE

• Recollapse v0.4 is out. This release adds regex metacharacter positions, stdin read support, input multiline support, and double URL encoding support, making it a handy tool for analyzing complex data. MORE

• Dalfox v2.11.0 is out with a new MCP server mode and JSONL output, plus it now supports XDG_CONFIG_HOME for easier config management. This release also squashes bugs and updates dependencies for better performance. MORE

• Linear introduces Pulse: Stay up to date on what's happening across projects and initiatives. MORE

💼 Work

💰 Career

• Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, starts his day with a run and juggles too many computers on his work desk. He values clarity and energy in new hires and says his parents shaped his views. MORE

• Navigating GovTech in 2025: The current state of the industry, importance of working on mission-critical programs, trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, and the ongoing spending on government technology. MORE

🚀 Productivity

• How to use Apple Reminders and Calendar as your core productivity system. The video covers setting up lists, using smart lists, managing tasks with metadata, and leveraging third-party apps and shortcuts to enhance the Reminders experience. MORE

• Just Press Record is an award-winning audio recorder that lets you easily record, transcribe, and sync audio across your Apple devices. Capture important moments and turn voice recordings into text. MORE

• Sam Altman's productivity tips emphasize choosing the right tasks, prioritizing effectively with lists, and optimizing physical well-being. He suggests focusing on important work and avoiding distractions to maximize output. MORE

• Open-source projects face a flood of support requests, overwhelming maintainers. LLMs can help users find answers themselves, freeing up developers to focus on building cool stuff. MORE

• How To Get The Most Out of A Book: Analytical Reading 101. Learn to dissect books like a pro, marking key points and summarizing chapters to boost comprehension and retention for all your research needs. MORE

🌎 Community

🎉 Celebrate

• Room for one more? Julie took a shot at a marketing intern position at Shopify, and she did it publicly. MORE

• Justin Gardner praises @Blaklis_ as a unique bug bounty content creator. He actively engages in BB discords, answering questions and offering constructive feedback, making a big impact in the field. MORE

• Daniel Vassallo sold Small Bets to Gumroad for $3.6M! He'll keep running the community, which will help Gumroad become more than just a payment processor. MORE

• NahamCon 2025, hosted by @Jhaddix, is coming! Get ready for May 23 to sharpen your skills and join the cyber fun, whether you're a CTF competitor or just eager for the presentations. MORE

• @rez0, @Rhynorater, @0xLupin, and @monkehack won Most Valuable Hacker at Google's AI-focused live hacking event in Tokyo! They enjoyed working with the Google team and exploring Japan. MORE

⚡️ Zeitgeist

• Weekly notes and thoughts from full-time bug bounty hunter Monke/Ciarán. He recaps a Japan trip with infosec friends, including winning MVH at Google's LLM Bugswat LHE! The team explored Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, hacking, eating local cuisine, and seeing the sights. MORE

• RyotaK shares their experience creating two challenges for the SECCON 13 CTF Finals, diving into the flaws in binary protocols and web server configurations that made the challenges possible. MORE

• STÖK shares advice for newcomers to bug bounties, emphasizing it's a "long con" like gold mining. Success requires creative thinking, intuition, and professional reporting to discover valuable vulnerabilities. MORE

• Bolt.new is hosting the world's largest hackathon starting May 30th, with a $1M+ prize pool, for both developers and non-developers. They're aiming to set a world record for software building. MORE

• sw33tLie enjoys using Project Discovery tools, except for Nuclei. He believes it's trying to do too much, leading to performance issues and dependency problems. They suggest that other tools, like ffuf, are more efficient despite both being written in Go. MORE

💛 Follow
Awesome accounts to follow. Randomly selected from my curated Twitter lists.

• @haksecio Penetration testing Cybersecurity consulting Appsec training Born in Australia, serving customers globally.

• @irsdl | Soroush Dalili | Hacker (ethical), web appsec specialist, trainer, tools builder & apps breaker, @SecProjectLtd founder | A dad-joke maker.

• @AssemblyFour | Assembly Four | We make products and services to empower sex workers throughout the world, committing a portion of profits to helping sex workers in need.

• @ackmage | hermit | research, hacking, art, gaming. @the_dork_web · @halfpotion · she/her.

• @vortexau | vortex | information security - bug bounty - motorsport - karting - memes - shitposts.

🍄 Level up

📰 Read

• Many security programs create more work than they solve, becoming "busywork generators." Learn how to avoid this trap by focusing on root causes and implementing strong security measures that reduce overall effort. MORE

• Website errors can be frustrating, but crafting clear and helpful error messages can build trust with users. By providing guidance and next steps, you show users you value their time and can help them navigate issues effectively. MORE

• For Justin Gardner, known to hackers as Rhynorater, hacking isn’t just a career or a side hustle—it’s a passion that has transformed his life. MORE

• "Careless People" is a tell-all book about Facebook's early days, and it reveals the company knew about its negative impacts but didn't care. Facebook doesn't want you to read it because it confirms many suspicions about their disregard for ethics and user safety. MORE

💡 Tips

• Claude Code is a command line tool for agentic coding. This post covers tips and tricks that have proven effective for using Claude Code across various codebases, languages, and environments. MORE

• 100 Ways To Live Better. This article gives you 100 simple tips to improve it, from your health to your relationships. It's like a cheat sheet for leveling up your everyday experiences. MORE

• text-wrap: balance can mess up Japanese and Korean text by creating weird line breaks. The fix? Use word-break: auto-phrase for Japanese and word-break: keep-all for Korean to keep things looking good. MORE

• DAN KOE uses AI by having it summarize YouTube expert videos, adding context, and turning that into a meta prompt for repeated use, which has led to excellent results. This approach helps refine prompts for various AI tasks. MORE

• Dani Grant, former Cloudflare PM, shares that shipping small wins early helps you build trust in a new org. Delivering value quickly builds credibility, especially with non-technical stakeholders. MORE

🧠 Wisdom

• The longer you wait to create something, the better it needs to be, right? But "quality over quantity" doesn't mean they can't coexist, so don't let that stop you from creating. MORE

• Feeling uninspired? This blog post talks about how starting a side project can bring joy back into your life by allowing you to explore and create without pressure. Sometimes, just wandering and exploring is enough. MORE

• Feeling burnt out from coding? This video shares tips (ft. Tech Twitter) on keeping it fun, like working on passion projects and not taking things too seriously. It's a great reminder to chill out and enjoy the process! MORE

• Shaan argues that competition isn't as tough as it seems because many people aren't serious. To succeed, take a simple idea and pursue it seriously. MORE

• Al on How to Get Rich, emphasizing that achieving top 1% outcomes, whether in sports, acting, or business, requires an intense focus and dedication that may appear unbalanced to outsiders. MORE

📚 Resources

• The Damn Vulnerable MCP Server is a training ground to learn how to secure AI-powered applications using the Model Context Protocol. It has 10 challenges that show you how attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in these systems. MORE

• Discover the Digital Thriving Playbook, a guide to creating online spaces where people can thrive! Explore methods, examples, guides, and big ideas to enhance digital well-being. MORE

• Curated list of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, which connect AI models to local and remote resources, enhancing AI capabilities through diverse integrations. MORE

• Explore AI red teaming, jailbreaking, and prompt injection with PromptLabs' curated resources. MORE

• A comprehensive security checklist for MCP-based AI tools. Built by SlowMist to safeguard LLM plugin ecosystems. MORE

🛠 Explore

🧰 Tools

• macOS app that connects your personal info with AI tools like Claude, letting you ask questions using your messages, contacts, and more. MORE

• Struggling to understand complex code? This AI tool analyzes codebases and creates easy-to-follow tutorials, turning confusing projects into simple lessons with clear visuals. MORE

• Taranis AI is an open-source tool that uses AI to gather info and analyze situations, collecting data from websites and turning it into easy-to-understand reports. It helps analysts make structured reports and PDFs for quick sharing. MORE

• Manifest is a single-file backend solution that simplifies website and app development by providing essential features like authentication, validation, and storage. It's great for rapid prototyping, microservices, and CRUD-heavy apps! MORE

🎥 Watch

• Web Dev Challenge S2 E1: Build a custom API + app in 4 hours. MORE

• DNS resolution techniques and tools used for bug bounty hunting and automation. It emphasizes the importance of passive DNS sources and re-resolving to discover new assets and keep existing information up to date. MORE

• PwnFunction breaks down the newly discovered Auto-Color malware — a sneaky Linux backdoor that’s been targeting universities and government systems. MORE

• PowerShell for Hackers is the first in a three-part series demonstrating how hackers can leverage PowerShell, a powerful tool native to Windows, for malicious activities. MORE

• Greg and co Vibe Coded a $90K/month SaaS App in 64 Minutes (using Replit). Join him, Billy Howell, and Nic Conley as they vibe code an "Invoice Nudger" SaaS App that helps freelancers automatically follow up on unpaid invoices. MORE

🎵 Listen

• Alex Danco's essay "Scarcity and Abundance in 2025" explains how AI creates new scarcities even as it makes things abundant. It gives you tools to think faster about new tech. MORE

• Shaan Puri and James Currier discuss how to build a $0 to $110M business using network effects, covering topics from savage founders to AI business ideas. They also share tips for what to do in your 20s and the importance of therapy. MORE

• Kim Caloca-Madden joins the Mac Power Users show to talk with the guys about her online business supporting other entrepreneurs and companies, and how automation and AI make her more efficient at her tasks. MORE

• Lulu Cheng Meservey: Meet Silicon Valley’s Top PR Master. She shares how companies can control their own narratives. She discusses building a platform and audience in today's world, plus crafting effective messages. MORE

• Anti-Business Billionaires: Lessons from Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard. MORE

🌐 Technology

• Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, an AI-powered IDE that has been used by over 1 million developers in just four months. Prior to finding success with Windsurf, the company pivoted twice—first from GPU virtualization infrastructure to an IDE plugin, and then to their own standalone IDE. MORE

• Want to be a top-tier programmer? Matthias Endler shares key traits of exceptional developers, like reading references and error messages, helping others, and embracing lifelong learning. These habits can help anyone level up their coding game. MORE

• o1 isn't just another chatbot; think of it as a "report generator" that needs tons of context upfront to nail the solution, like a new employee. Once you give it all the info, it can one-shot entire code files and explain complex concepts. MORE

• Resend launched new.email and warmed up the domain to send thousands of emails daily. They built their domain's reputation like building credit, starting small to avoid being marked as spam. MORE

• The Post-Developer Era, for everything that has changed over the past two years, two things have stayed the same: 1) Companies still need human developers to build their products. 2) AI Evangelists are still claiming that, any day now, companies won’t need human developers to build their products. MORE

👀 Interesting

• Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. MORE

• Because Computers Are Stupid. Van shares his love-hate relationship with computers, which stems from their finicky nature and disposability. He contrasts this with his love for his old Land Cruiser, which is simple and reliable, despite having some computer components. MORE

• Experts are rethinking ADHD, challenging old ideas about it being a purely biological disorder. They're finding that environment and individual experiences may play a bigger role than we thought in managing ADHD symptoms. MORE

• She’s reinventing the science of aging. Meet Julie Clark: the 56-year-old whose biological age clocks in at 36. She’s outpacing Bryan Johnson, the $2M-a-year biohacker, on a mere $4/day. Here's her simple anti-aging routine for peak health and lasting longevity. MORE

• The first ever State of Devs 2025 survey explores the non-coding aspects of developers' lives, like their beliefs and concerns about AI. Take the survey to share your experiences and contribute to a better understanding of the current tech landscape. MORE

💭 Quote

📈 Learned something?

Until next week, take care of yourself and each other,

Bee 🐝

^{This newsletter may contain affiliate links that support its costs. These links lead to tools, courses, and resources that I've personally found helpful.}