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A SEASON FOR HACKING
Howdy, my fellow hackers,
Spring is beautiful here at the pb33f ranch at the moment. The grass is green, and the foliage is fresh and youthful.
Everything is also covered in a thick layer of yellowish-green pollen. It doesn’t help that our ranch is in a forest.
A megaton of hackery has been going on. Let me catch you up.
OPENAPI-CHANGES GOT A GLOW-UP NEW!
openapi-changes was set aside for the vast majority of 2025. Not because we didn’t like her anymore,
but because she was being re-built inside the OpenAPI Doctor.
It looked like she was being ignored, but she was actually being transformed. The codebase was poorly constructed. It
started as a tech-demo for libopenapi, enough to work, but not enough to be really useful.
There were a lot of issues with the stability of the codebase. Honestly, there was no saving it.
Every single line of code was re-written. Not a single element of the original codebase exists. There’s a whole brand new feature
set that fixes so many things, it’d take a changelog of its own to list them all.
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It doesn’t suck anymore, but for a while there - it did.
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All new:
- Terminal UI (to match vacuum)
- Markdown Report (reads like an actual changelog now)
- HTML Report (fully offline, best diffing experience you’ve ever seen)
Read the article to learn more
OPENAPI-DOCTOR FEATURE DUMP NEW!
During the winter, it’s been a coding frenzy. AI agentic coding appeared on the radars of the mainstream engineering community, and I watched
a Cambrian explosion of new creativity appearing on the internet.
New shiny everywhere!
And I am no different.
A big old bag of fun arrived in the OpenAPI Doctor very quietly about six weeks ago. It’s been sitting there waiting
for you to play with it for a while now. Have you tried it? No? You’re missing out on:
The Diagramatron
Render Class/UML Diagrams for any object. Export to MermaidJS.
Focused View
See any API Object dependency graph. All upstream and downstream dependencies.
OpenAPI Doctor
A brand new GitHub App is available for Automated Governance and change detection.
Visual Bundler
Explore multi-file/large/exploded OpenAPI specifications visually with the explorer.
Upgraded Explorer
Faster, cleaner and a new progressive disclosure experience makes it truly explorable.
Visual Task System
See what is going on behind the curtain, no wizards here - only doctors.
Themes for the Colorblind!
Roger Mode is here! An E-Ink inspired theme for those who struggle with color.
And more…
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Read the article for more details about all the new FREE things to play with.
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Loads of screenshots and explanations are available in the article.
VACUUM GOES TURBO
In February, I went hard on performance tuning the entire stack. The result? vacuum went turbo:
- 3× faster wall-clock speeds!
- 5.5× faster on large specs!
- 21× less user CPU use!
- up to 72% lower peak memory footprint!
A new -T switch is available that enables a free speedup on an already much-improved engine. IT’S TURBO TIME!
The past few months have seen some neat, new features added to vacuum. Here are a few of them.
Async functions and promises for custom JS functions
An event loop was added to
vacuum’s JavaScript engine, as well as a native fetch() implementation to make it easy to call remote APIs from custom
functions for rulesets.
To demonstrate it, a sentiment API
demo showcases how to build functions for rules that call external APIs.
Supports Bruno’s new OpenCollection format
vacuum also gained a new open-collection command that will generate a collection using Bruno’s OpenCollection
format. Ready to import directly into Bruno.
OpenAPI Overlay support
vacuum also supports a new apply-overlay command that will apply an OpenAPI Overlay
to a specification. More details on this are available in the apply-overlay documentation.
Just upgrade and it’s all there waiting to go.
CLI CODING AND SCREENSHOTS
On the tools front myself, I use both Claude Code and Codex side-by-side in the terminal.
Trying to show them how terrible they were making things look got boring and repetitive. On macOS, I was taking a
screenshot of something and dragging it into the terminal (which is still better than typing the location in).
This sucks after about five minutes. Looking around the internet for a solution was unfruitful.
So I built one, and then wrote up the solution.
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Automating screenshots with terminal-based agentic coding tools saves me real time every day.
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I am using this daily. I depend on it, and it might be useful for you too.
A NEW ARRIVAL
There has been a birth this spring down at the ranch. A brand new, very special tool that will bring together
the pb33f toolchain as a family.
It’s part of the puzzle that most folks start with. It’s also something I originally started building back in 2019,
inside VMware.
She’s not ready for an audience yet, but I will tell you her name.
She is called the Printing Press. She is the start of something exciting.
More to come soon. Until next time…
Touch the grass, and hack code.
quobix.
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