Kent C. Dodds

Migrating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 11 using Claude’s API? 🤖 I asked Claude, Groq, ChatGPT, and Gemini to estimate API costs only for a moderately complex site. Here’s what they said (Note: SUPER rough napkin estimates): 🔍 Scope: ~20–30 entity types, ~20–50 contrib modules, theme update, content migration 💰 API Cost Estimates: ✅ Claude: $295–$580 ✅ Groq: $250–$900 ✅ Gemini: $4,400–$18,780 ✅ ChatGPT: $36–$45 Key tasks (API-driven): ✅ Generating content migration scripts for ~20–30 entity types ✅ Assisting with ~20–50 contrib module upgrades ✅ Supporting theme update for Drupal 11 compatibility ✅ Code review & documentation lookup 📊 I think Claude’s range ($295–$580) feels realistic, though a Claude Max plan at $200/mo for 1–2 months could go a long way. Costs assume moderate API usage (~$0.01–$0.05/1,000 tokens, verify at anthropic.com). Hey maybe someone should sponsor me to try this out? 😉 #Drupal #WebMigration #Drupal11 #AIAutomation

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It’s late, and you start getting alerts that requests to your web server are failing. You try to load a page and it hangs endlessly. The server isn’t responding to anything, and requests are continuing to queue up. What do you do?! My next Ruby concurrency post is "When good threads go bad". A deep dive into all things stuck threads, how to deal with them, and what to avoid. Link in the comments

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Are your Lovable projects getting slower and eating more tokens as they grow? Here's a tip for better Lovable usage and saving tokens when your project gets bigger. (For small apps this isn't as important.) 👉 Have Lovable create a separate file where it writes down the important info about your project - a Master Plan. A general overview of the app, its purpose and target audience. You can also have it add design guidelines to this file, once the design looks the way you want it. In your project settings (under Knowledge), add a line: "Before you start building or planning, always read through the Master Plan file." Or just reference it in the chat when you're about to build something new. 👉 Why is this useful? On longer projects, the Lovable agent has to read through your entire long chat history to understand things. The longer your chat is and the more files in your codebase, the bigger the job - so it takes more and more tokens. Instead, you have one file with all the important info that it always reads through. You can update it as you build, asking it to add important updates and feature descriptions to that file. Do you use these instructions? :)

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For years, we treated "good code" as optional. Tests? Nah, I have to ship. Types? I know what I'm doing. Docs? It's all in my head. It is counterintuitive, but agentic coding forces us to pay the "best practice tax" we've all been dodging for decades. It is now the most valuable debt your eng org can pay off. I write about some of the non-obvious things we do in our codebase to give agents superpowers, in today's Bits post (link in comments)

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Drupal folks are everywhere! Former Drupal folks anyway. Over the last few days several people I know from the Drupal community have shown up on the front page of Hacker News. They weren't talking about Drupal. They've moved on to other things. Miguel Jacq released Enroll, a tool for importing existing servers into Ansible. This morning Mattias Geniar's post entitled "Web development is fun again" was sitting in the top 20. He discusses how AI has removed the need for deep domain knowledge, which in turn has made "web dev fun again". If it is a day ending in y, then Jeff Geerling is probably on the front page of the orange site. This was confirmed by him coming in second in the "The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025" rankings.

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Learn how to use Unmanaged Files in Drupal for maximum performance and flexibility! In this comprehensive 6-part series, Jeff G. Greenberg shows you step-by-step how to ditch the database overhead and build custom services for fast, clean file handling. Dive into the full series and see how to get a random, category-aware image trio with zero database queries. 🔗 Find the full series on The Drop Times now! https://lnkd.in/ghh75AMQ

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I hate disparaging others but apparently this came up on Drupal Planet so I must. The article from "Drupal life hack's" with url drupal com ua has an article Object-Oriented Form API in Drupal 11. This has nothing to do with reality. Absolutely none. There's not a single thing in there which corresponds to a committed change. Please consult the change notices instead: "New Object oriented approach for working with form/render arrays" and "Widget elements can be written using object oriented approach".

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Agentic Coding Tools Are Forcing Better Documentation Anyone who’s joined an existing product knows the pattern. The "why" is often locked in tribal knowledge. Decisions, tradeoffs, and historical context are missing, outdated, or never written down. Documentation was created once, checked off, and forgotten. Agentic coding tools (Windsurf, Claude Code, etc.) make that impossible to ignore. These tools don’t just generate code. They reason across a codebase using context, constraints, and intent. That makes documentation a first-class input: → design intent → conventions and standards → explicit guardrails In large codebases, consistency won’t come only from reviews anymore. Documentation becomes part of how these tools behave. Bad docs don’t just slow teams down. They create risk — and agentic tools will amplify it. Well-maintained documentation lets both humans and agents move faster, with confidence. #AgenticAI #Documentation

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🐘 "PHP Grew Up. Did You Notice?" PHP in 2024 was a completely different language than the one you're making fun of. I get it. The old jokes write themselves. mysql_query(). Global state everywhere. $_POST['whatever']. I lived through that era too. I have the scars. But here's the thing, while a lot of us moved on and kept dunking on PHP from the sidelines, the language kept shipping. Quietly. Consistently. Every year. PHP 8.0 brought named arguments, match expressions, and union types. PHP 8.1 brought enums, fibers, readonly properties, intersection types. PHP 8.2 brought readonly classes, new random APIs, and a serious cleanup of the deprecation backlog. That's not maintenance. That's a language that's actively evolving. Over the next few weeks I'm going to walk through the features I wish I'd paid attention to sooner. Not with docs-style explanations, just real examples of how they changed the way I actually write code day to day. If you still think PHP is stuck in 2009, stick around. I think you'll be surprised. Feature 1: Readonly Classes You were writing 3 files to do what one keyword now does For years, making a truly immutable object in PHP felt like a punishment. You'd write a class, make all the properties private, write a constructor, write a getter for every single property, add a docblock, hope nobody on the team did something creative with reflection... and then do it again for the next DTO. Every. Single. Time. PHP 8.2 just added readonly class and I genuinely felt a little embarrassed about how much boilerplate I used to write. The readonly modifier on the class means every single property is automatically readonly. No setters. No accidental mutation. No defensive getters. You can still make properties public because nothing can change them after construction anyway. This is the kind of feature that makes your DTOs, value objects, and API response models genuinely pleasant to write. I've refactored probably a dozen classes since this landed. Each one got shorter. None got worse. What pattern do you use for immutable data transfer objects? Still doing the old approach? #PHP #PHP82 #WebDevelopment #CleanCode #PHPGrewUp #BackendDev #BackendDevelopment

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Worked on a Claude skill so that one could ask "set up Bref" in any PHP project. It _looked_ awesome: Claude would analyze the project, ask questions, etc. But it's a fail. As usual, Claude just invents options, doesn't follow the script reliably, uses its outdated knowledge... I don't think this experiment means that AI can't help at all, but I need to find another place or format. For onboarding new projects, I'll double down on improving the existing way.

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If your .NET app runs background jobs or distributed workers, you need a way to prevent duplicate execution. Otherwise, two instances can pick up the same task: sending duplicate emails, charging twice, or overwriting data. That’s where distributed locking comes in. In my latest video, I show how to implement production-ready distributed locks in .NET using a single clean library. You’ll see how to: - Use Postgres advisory locks and Redis for distributed coordination - Build a reusable locking abstraction for any .NET app - Decide when it actually makes sense to use one If you care about reliability and data integrity, this one’s worth your time. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eWfVWmHk

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