Spencer Blake
Spencer Blake

Spencer Blake is a developer and technical writer focused on advanced workflows, AI-driven development, and the tools that actually make a difference in a programmer's daily routine. He created Tips News to share the kind of knowledge that senior developers use every day but rarely gets taught anywhere. When he's not writing, he's probably automating something that shouldn't be done manually.

How to Write Commit Messages That Actually Help Your Team

You are six months into a codebase and a bug surfaces in production. You open git log and find: “fix”, “WIP”, “update”, “asdf”, “fix2”, “final”, “final_FINAL”. The history tells you nothing. You cannot bisect, you cannot understand intent, and you cannot determine whether any of those commits introduced the regression. This is not a minor …

Role Prompting for Developers: How to Get AI to Think Like a Senior Engineer

You ask the model to review your authentication middleware. It returns a surface-level summary: “the code looks clean, consider adding error handling.” That output is useless. The model did not understand its role, the codebase context, or what “review” actually means in a production environment. Role prompting fixes this — not by making the model …