How I work
I review tools I actually use in production. For categories outside my daily stack, I lean on multiple independent sources — minimum three — before forming a view. Every article ends with the full source list so you can audit my reasoning.
What I won’t review
- Products from my current employer (Synology Taiwan)
- Head-to-heads naming my employer against direct competitors
This is a hard line, not a soft preference. Editorial independence is the whole point of the project.
Reach me
charles@topinsight.co — for tips, corrections, or pitch suggestions.
Articles
ZFS pool design for a 4-bay homelab: the decisions that actually matter
A practical guide to designing a ZFS pool for a 4-bay homelab in 2026. Mirror vs RAIDZ, drives, ashift, recordsize, special vdevs, and the boring ops that decide if the pool survives.
Claude Code vs Cursor: which AI coding tool wins your daily workflow in 2026
YouTube reviewers love both. Reddit users tell a more complicated story. We reconcile the two and give a clear pick per engineer profile.
Claude Code review: the agentic CLI that actually finishes the task
After six months of using Claude Code as my primary AI coding interface, here is what it does better than Cursor, where it still trips, and which jobs it should own on a senior engineer’s machine.
Cursor review: still the IDE to beat for AI-assisted coding
Cursor has fended off bigger competitors for two years. After daily use, here is what it still beats Copilot at, where Claude Code now wins, and whether $20/month is justified.
Cloudflare Workers vs Vercel Edge Functions: which edge runtime wins in 2026
Edge compute compared head-to-head: cold start, runtime, pricing, ecosystem, and the workloads each platform was built for — with clear picks per use case.
Building your own MCP server for Claude Code: a working tutorial
After running ten community MCP servers for months, the next step is writing your own. Here is the start-to-finish tutorial, including the parts the docs gloss over.
Linear Cycles for solo engineers: how to use them without the team you don’t have
Linear Cycles are designed for teams. Solo and tiny-team engineers get more out of them than the docs suggest — if you adapt the workflow.
Unraid vs TrueNAS Scale in mid-2025: where they converge, where they diverge
Both platforms shipped meaningful changes in early 2025. The "which to pick" answer has shifted. Here is the working comparison after running both in homelabs.
DeepSeek V3 for coding: the cheap-and-good model that changed the cost equation
DeepSeek V3 lands frontier-adjacent coding quality at roughly one-tenth the API price of Claude or GPT-4o. After six weeks of daily use, here is where it actually fits.
Cursor alternatives after the June 2025 pricing change: where users actually went
Cursor’s pricing change pushed a meaningful slice of heavy users to look elsewhere. We tracked the Reddit migration data and tested every credible alternative. Here is the working ranking.
The Cursor pricing crisis of June 2025: what happened, what users did, what it means
Cursor changed its pricing in mid-June and broke trust with heavy users. The timeline, the Reddit reaction, and what the rest of 2025 looks like for the AI IDE market.
Aider best practices: the first-week workflow that makes it actually work
Aider rewards a specific working pattern. After three months of daily use, here is the configuration, conventions, and conversational habits that earn the productivity gain.
Vercel Functions runtime shifts: what June 2025 broke and what it fixed
Vercel has been quietly reshaping its Functions runtime through 2025. The Fluid Compute work and Edge runtime changes affect real apps. Here is what to watch for.
Cline vs Roo vs Kilo Code: the open-source coding-agent fork tree, untangled
Three forks, three philosophies, one underlying engine. After running all three across real projects, here is what each fork actually optimises for and which one belongs in your stack.
Building a quiet homelab server in 2025: the parts list and the silence trade-offs
Quiet homelab is now achievable without spending FAANG-money. The hardware is here, the trade-offs are tractable. Here is the working parts list and the noise-vs-capability math.
Neon Postgres branching: using your database like a git branch
Neon turned Postgres branching from a feature into a workflow. After six months on Neon, here is how to actually integrate branches into your dev / CI / preview pipeline.
Claude vs GPT vs Gemini for coding in 2025: the API-tier shootout
Three frontier model families compete for your coding token spend. After six months running them across real workloads, here is which API actually deserves which job.
Continue.dev and the open-source AI editor extension experiment
Continue.dev is the OSS attempt at building Cursor as a VS Code extension. After three months side-by-side with Cursor itself, here is what the trade actually looks like.
Proxmox VE in 2025: the default homelab hypervisor, reviewed honestly
Proxmox VE 8.4 ships in April 2025 and remains the homelab hypervisor everyone defaults to. After running it for years across multiple builds, here is what it gets right and the rough edges.
Fly.io vs Railway in 2025: which small-team backend host wins your money
Two hosts that have eaten meaningful share from the old guard. Fly.io and Railway sit in the same conceptual slot but trade differently. Here is the working choice.
Windsurf (Codeium) review: the IDE pivot that ate the parent product
Codeium rebranded its AI IDE to Windsurf in late 2024 and bet the company on it. Six months later the bet looks mostly correct — with some real rough edges.
MCP servers for Claude Code: the essential first ten to wire up
MCP is the protocol that turns Claude Code from a sharp CLI into a connected agent. After three months of wiring servers in, here are the ten that earn permanent space in my setup.
Raycast Pro AI features review: is the $8/month upgrade worth it for engineers?
Raycast added Pro AI features in 2024 and has been iterating fast. After three months on Pro, here is whether the subscription justifies itself for a working engineer.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet on real coding tasks: benchmarks vs daily-use reality
Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet posted strong SWE-bench numbers in February. Six weeks in, the daily-driver experience matches — mostly. Here is what the benchmarks miss.
TrueNAS Scale vs Core in 2025: which to pick (and whether the question still matters)
iXsystems has signalled Scale is the future and Core is on a long maintenance tail. The reality is more nuanced. Here is the migration / new-build calculus for a 2025 homelab.
Turso review: edge SQLite has matured into a real production option
Turso bet a year and a half ago that libSQL + edge replication would beat managed Postgres for read-heavy apps. In 2025 the bet is paying off — for the right workloads.
Cursor vs GitHub Copilot in 2025: which AI IDE actually deserves your $20 a month
Cursor outpaced Copilot in 2024 and held the lead through Q1 2025. Microsoft is catching up fast. Here is the practical head-to-head — autocomplete, agent mode, ecosystem, cost.
Cloudflare Workers Static Assets is here. What it means for Pages, and for you.
Cloudflare just made Workers the unified deployment target for both static sites and dynamic code. Pages is not dead — but the writing is on the wall. Here is the practical read.
Aider review 2025: the no-frills AI pair-programmer that quietly outlasts the hype
Aider is the OSS CLI AI coding tool that does one thing well: edit your repo from a chat prompt. After three months of daily use, here is what it gets right and where it shows its age.