Articles, notes and updates on the agent, the tools, and the craft of building software with AI.
Every developer has done this. You're building a landing page and the client says "make it look like Stripe" or "I want that Linear feel." You open the target site, start inspecting elements, copy hex codes into a notepad, screenshot the button styles, try to figure out the spacing scale, and piece together a mental model of their design system.
There's a moment in every long-running project where you realize you've explained the same thing to the AI agent four times this week. "We use the repository pattern." "Tests go in tests/Feature/." "Always run Pint before committing." "The API returns paginated responses with a meta key."
There's no new command in this release. No new extension, no new theme, no new slash command. v0.7.0 is a dependency update. Four major version bumps, zero code changes required.
There's a pattern that emerges after a few weeks of using a coding agent daily. You catch yourself typing the same instructions over and over. Not the same tasks — the tasks are different. But the framing around them is identical.
There's a workflow that every developer does dozens of times a day. You're in the middle of building something. You need to check what's in the database. You open a database client — TablePlus, DBeaver, phpMyAdmin, the MySQL CLI. You write a query. You read the result. You go back to your editor. You continue coding.
Elyra ships with six themes — dark, light, palenight, catppuccin, onedark, and norwegian-midnight. That covers a fair range of moods, from the airy daylight of light to the deep blue dusk of norwegian-midnight. But "a fair range" is not "everyone's range," and sooner or later somebody asks the inevitable question: what if none of these are quite right for me?
The flashy features get the blog posts, but the changes that actually determine whether someone keeps using a tool happen in the first five minutes. Here's what's new in Elyra v0.6.1 and v0.6.2
Elyra v0.6.0 isn't about new commands or themes. It's about what happens inside the agent over the course of a two-hour session — how it remembers, what it costs, and which model does the work
Elyra's footer packs a lot of information into two lines. Token counts (input, output, cache read, cache write), estimated cost, context window usage with percentage, auto-compact status, model name, thinking level, provider name, git branch, working directory, session name. It's all there, all the time.