Category: Artificial Intelligence
The Price Per Token Is Dropping. Will It Stay That Way?
LLMs are at the heart of the current AI movement. An LLM’s ability to respond to prompts with human-like responses is astonishing. All of our first interactions with ChatGPT in 2022 were amazing. The first time I used GitHub Copilot to generate a basic database access method, it was clear that something significant was about…
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From Guesswork to Structured Context: How Figma MCP Changed My Dev Workflow
Highlight: I used to rely on screenshots of Figma mockups. Now I pull structured layout and style metadata straight from the design files. When our design team shares a new mockup, they send the Figma file and link — no PNGs, no screenshots. But early on, that still meant a lot of guesswork for me….
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Building a RAG Model
It feels like everyone wants to sprinkle a little AI on every software project right now. Sometimes for good reason, and sometimes just because they want a little AI. But AI, much like a seasoning for our food, might not be an improvement. We need to know what tool to use and when. One of…
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Putting GitHub’s New AI Agent to the Test
GitHub has been on a tear recently, adding a lot of new features in a short amount of time. It’s exciting to see the platform evolve so quickly, especially with its deeper integration of AI. One of the newer features that caught my eye is Agent tasks. The core idea is that these tasks can…
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Harnessing the Hype: A Pragmatic Guide to Using AI in Development
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s another part of our development toolbox. And like any powerful tool, it can be used to build incredible things with great efficiency, or it can create a mess that is difficult to untangle. The key isn’t just using AI; it’s using it with discipline and intent….
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Vectors, Python, AI, and Your Face
Building a Facial Recognition System with Cursor AI At Don’t Panic Labs, I recently embarked on an prototype project to explore the intersection of computer vision, Python, and AI-assisted development. Our goal was to build a light-weight facial recognition system that could identify faces, create a searchable database, and analyze images. All while leveraging Cursor…
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MCP Magic: AI-Powered Azure SQL Analysis in Plain English
Imagine being able to ask your database questions in plain English and getting visualizations quickly. Traditional SQL analysis requires expertise in SQL query language and separate visualization tools. However, by combining MSSQL and Charting MCP servers in VS Code with natural language, we can enable data analysis for both technical and non-technical users. This powerful…
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What Military Intelligence Taught Me About Business Intelligence
The world of business intelligence came as second nature to me. Transitioning from the public to the private sector, I LOVED doing competitor analysis and analyzing the market, so much so that I didn’t understand why it wasn’t like that for everyone. As a product manager at the time, it just made sense. Talking with…
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CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 3
In Part 2 of this series, we improved the prompts, which solved some of the last issues. But in Parts 1 and 2, a hidden helper was living beneath the surface, helping us along. That helper is the copilot-instructions.md file. I am pre-prompting the LLM with this file to show how I want things to…
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CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we used a template to help with our prompting. Ultimately, it generated code for us. But that code wasn’t perfect. It had many small issues. Probably the most annoying was that it often gets import statements wrong. Now, these are super easy to fix, but they still require fixing….
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