This vibe coding cheat sheet explains how plain-language prompts can build apps fast, plus the planning, testing, and security checks needed.

The post Vibe Coding Cheat Sheet: Tools, Prompts, Security Tips, and More appeared first on TechRepublic.

BONUS: Your Developers Got 20x Faster — Now Watch Your Product Managers' Heads Explode

Clarke Ching is "The Bottleneck Guy" — and he just spotted the bottleneck that AI is about to create in every software organization. It's not in the code. It's inside the heads of the people who decide what gets built. In this conversation, Vasco and Clarke unpack why speeding up developers with AI tools pushes the real constraint upstream — onto product managers, designers, and leaders — and what to do before cognitive overload crushes the people your organization depends on most.

Every Business Has a Bottleneck — Most Are in the Wrong Place

"Every single client I have is a detective puzzle. We're looking for this quiet killer sitting inside their business, siphoning off money. And if you look at them without the idea of going 'where's the bottleneck?' — you mistake the busyness for productivity."

 

Clarke approaches Theory of Constraints like a detective story, not a physics lecture. Every business has a bottleneck — the narrowest point that chokes throughput. The question isn't whether you have one, it's whether it's in the right place. In software development, Clarke argues, the bottleneck should almost always be the developers. Not because they're slow, but because they're the pacing resource — like the aircraft carrier in a naval fleet that sets the speed for everything else. When developers are the bottleneck, the people upstream (product managers, designers, architects) have time to curate high-quality, high-value inputs. The people downstream (testers, ops) can deliver fast feedback. Everything flows. But when the bottleneck drifts somewhere else — and nobody notices — everyone gets busy, nothing flows, and the organization mistakes that busyness for productivity. Clarke's latest book, The Speed Book, lays out how to find where your bottleneck actually is and move it to where it belongs.

AI Just Moved the Bottleneck — And Nobody's Talking About It

"Just imagine one person trying to feed 100 developers. It's ridiculous. Everyone goes, 'oh, that's just crazy.' But that's kind of going to be what it's like."

 

Here's the problem: AI coding tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot — are making developers dramatically faster. If a team of 5 developers becomes 20x more productive, that's the equivalent of 100 developers. But you still have one product manager feeding them. The bottleneck hasn't disappeared — it's moved upstream. And when a bottleneck moves to the people who make product decisions, three things happen: they cut corners on requirements (shipping half-baked ideas because the team can turn them around fast), they feed developers busy work just to keep them occupied, and — worst of all — they lose the time needed to push through complexity to find elegance. Clarke references Steve Jobs's insight: Apple kept working past "peak complexity" until they reached "peak simplicity." That's where great products come from. But a product manager juggling work for 100 developers has no time for that journey. Elegance goes out the window.

Why Giving AI to Product People Almost Makes Things Worse

"If you want to wear your dog out so she sleeps, don't take her for long walks. Make the dog think. Brain games exhaust the dog faster than running."

 

The obvious fix — give product people AI tools too — sounds right but misses the point. AI can handle the easy parts of product work: drafting user stories, generating specs, compiling research. That's the equivalent of taking the dog for a run. But the hard parts — the deep thinking about what to build, why it matters, how features interact — that's brain work. And brain work is exhausting in a way that volume work is not. Clarke works with senior leaders whose biggest challenge is pacing themselves. Heavy cognitive lifting burns through energy fast — your brain consumes 30-40% of your body's glucose when you're thinking hard. When AI handles the easy work, the proportion of your day spent on exhausting brain work jumps from maybe 15-20% to 50% or more. It's like lifting weights for six hours straight. You don't get stronger — you break down. On top of that, product people go from coordinating one stream of work to juggling many simultaneous initiatives. Clarke calls these "idea grenades" — and when you're juggling chainsaws with grenades attached, you start dropping things.

The Real Danger: Going in the Wrong Direction, 100x Faster

"If you change the relative capacities and make some of them much, much faster, the bottleneck's gonna move. My next book, jokingly, is gonna be called 'Who Moved My Bottleneck?'"

 

There's an amplification effect that makes this worse than a simple throughput problem. An error in a line of code affects one line. An error in a design document ripples into hundreds of lines. An error at the strategic level — building the wrong features entirely — can be a disaster for the company. Now add AI speed to that equation. Overwhelmed product people making rushed decisions don't just slow things down — they point the entire organization in the wrong direction, and AI-powered developers execute that wrong direction at 20x speed. As Clarke puts it: you crash into the mountain, faster. The fundamental Theory of Constraints insight applies: if you speed up a non-bottleneck resource, you don't speed up the system. You just create more work-in-progress, more chaos, and more cognitive load for whoever the real bottleneck is.

Four Experiments to Try Before Cognitive Crush Hits Your Team

"Quality will come from actually slowing down. Money, profits will come from slowing down, building very good products, focusing on why we're building these products, not just how do we keep the AIs working."

 

Clarke offers four practical experiments for teams navigating this shift:

 

• Get product people working with AI — as a thought partner, not a turbo boost. Teach them to delegate the routine work to AI so they can protect their cognitive energy for the decisions that actually matter. Think of AI as a delegation tool, not a productivity multiplier.

• Help product people find their sustainable pace. Like Clarke's gym trainer who said "don't come five days a week or you'll never come back" — the people doing heavy cognitive lifting need to pace themselves. Old-school agile called this sustainable pace. It's never been more relevant.

• Don't try to keep developers (or AI) busy all the time. The instinct to maximize utilization is the instinct that creates the problem. With AI, you're renting capacity by the minute, not paying salaries. Use it at the pace of good product thinking, not at maximum throughput. Turn the tap on and off as needed.

• Measure what matters: value delivered, not stories completed. If 60-70% of features rarely get used today, imagine what happens when you 20x the feature output without improving the decision quality upstream. More features, more waste — at scale.

About Clarke Ching

Clarke Ching is "The Bottleneck Guy" — a Theory of Constraints and lean expert who wrote Rolling Rocks Downhill, the agile+lean business novel that never mentions agile, and The Bottleneck Rules. Born in New Zealand, he spent 20 years abroad (15 of them in Scotland) before returning home. He's spent decades helping teams find and manage the one constraint that controls everything else. LinkedIn

 

You can link with Clarke Ching on LinkedIn.

 

Download audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scrummastertoolbox/20260516_Clarke_Ching_BONUS.mp3?dest-id=246429

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If I asked you to tell me what is related to what, you would not run a vector search in your head — you would build a little graph. That is what makes a Knowledge Graph more powerful than RAG, and you do not need a multi-thousand-dollar graph database to do it. Stop and try it. Picture your three closest co-workers. Now picture what projects they are on, who reports to whom, and which of them sat in the meeting last Tuesday. You did not "search" for any of that. You walked a

GitHub’s latest move to shake up its Copilot coding assistant is to give it its very own home in a dedicated app.

The Microsoft subsidiary announced on Thursday a technical preview of the GitHub Copilot app, a standalone desktop application designed to manage coding agents, issues, pull requests, and development sessions from a single interface.

The app lets developers launch Copilot tasks directly from GitHub issues, prompts, or existing code sessions, while tracking progress across repositories and active agent runs.

“A standalone desktop application designed to manage coding agents, issues, pull requests and development sessions from a single interface.”

According to GitHub, the app includes a unified inbox for surfacing issues and pull requests, side-by-side diff reviews, session history, repository context, and support for running multiple coding agents simultaneously. Developers can also inspect proposed changes, leave feedback, resume paused sessions, and move completed work into pull requests.

Under the hood, the new app is built on GitHub Copilot CLI, GitHub’s terminal-based AI coding agent, which reached general availability in February. The desktop client brings those agent capabilities into a dedicated graphical interface, allowing developers to supervise coding sessions, repositories, and tasks without bouncing between terminals, editors, and browser tabs.

Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, the Copilot app is currently in public preview for Copilot Business and Enterprise subscribers, while Copilot Pro and Pro+ users can join a waitlist for early access.

GitHub hasn’t formally announced a full public launch date. However, the announcement’s accompanying product video references June 2, suggesting the company may be targeting that date for a broader rollout.

Beyond the IDE

Since launching in 2021, Copilot has primarily existed inside developer tools such as Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Visual Studio itself. GitHub later expanded Copilot into GitHub.com, mobile apps and terminal-based tooling through Copilot CLI.

The original experience revolved around inline suggestions and chat assistance embedded directly inside the editor. Developers would write code locally, while Copilot generated completions, answered questions or suggested edits alongside their existing workflow.

“The new desktop app pushes Copilot further toward the model emerging across the wider AI coding market.”

The new desktop app pushes Copilot further toward the model emerging across the wider AI coding market: autonomous coding agents operating across repositories, tasks, and cloud environments. That puts GitHub into more direct competition with tools such as Claude Code from Anthropic and OpenAI’s Codex, all of which have gained traction by allowing developers to delegate larger chunks of engineering work to AI systems.

GitHub’s advantage, of course, is that much of the surrounding developer infrastructure already lives on its platform. Repositories, issues, pull requests, CI pipelines, and code review systems are already built into GitHub, giving the company a way to tie coding agents directly into the existing software development lifecycle.

Petter Arnesen, an Azure MVP and cloud architect who had early access to the app for several weeks, described GitHub’s approach as “probably the most interesting implementation” of an AI developer assistant he has tried so far.

In a LinkedIn post, Arnesen said he had been using the app for everything from side projects to agent-driven pull request review loops where Copilot could wait for feedback, address comments, and update PRs automatically. Still, he said he would not yet “unleash this on production systems without supervision,” pointing to bugs during the preview period and a tendency for AI agents to produce overly complicated solutions without human oversight.

Copilot’s commercial model

The launch follows some major changes to Copilot over recent months, as GitHub adjusts both the product and commercial model.

In April, GitHub paused new sign-ups for some Copilot individual plans while introducing tighter usage limits for existing subscribers, reflecting growing demand and rising infrastructure costs tied to AI coding tools.

Shortly afterward, the company announced a broader overhaul of Copilot pricing, moving away from a largely fixed-price subscription model toward usage-based billing tied to tokens consumed by different AI models.

Under the revised structure, pricing factors in input tokens, generated output, and cached context usage, with rates varying depending on which underlying model developers choose to run. The changes bring Copilot closer to how foundation model providers themselves charge for AI inference.

GitHub has also spent recent months expanding the underlying agent infrastructure around Copilot. On Wednesday, the company introduced a REST API for launching cloud-based Copilot agent tasks, alongside unified session views inside JetBrains IDEs.

The desktop app now brings many of those pieces together into a more coherent product surface.

More broadly, the release reflects how quickly AI coding tools are evolving. Early coding assistants focused on helping developers write individual functions or snippets faster. The newer generation revolves around systems capable of handling larger tasks independently across repositories and projects.

GitHub’s new app suggests the company sees that transition as central to Copilot’s future — and does not want that market defined by its big-name rivals.

The post GitHub takes aim at Claude Code and Codex with its new Copilot app appeared first on The New Stack.

In our commitment to Windows quality, we outlined our plans to deliver improvements in performance, reliability, and craft. We are also committed to being transparent about the work behind those efforts, including what we are shipping, why we prioritized those features, and where we still have more work to do. Start and taskbar are some of the most visible and frequently used experiences in Windows, so we are focused on improving their quality and giving you more flexibility to personalize them to meet your needs. Let’s walk through where we're making meaningful progress against the feedback we’ve heard from you, rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel over the coming weeks, including several rolling out today.

Bringing more personalization to the taskbar

The taskbar is where your PC experience comes to life. Just like a well-organized workspace, having it tailored to your needs helps you stay productive, so we’re introducing more ways to customize it.

Taskbar positions

Location, location, location. The ability to move the taskbar to the top or sides of the screen has been one of the most requested features, and we are bringing it to Windows 11. Starting today, Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel will be able to:

• Position the taskbar on any edge of the screen: Top, bottom, left, or right (see figure 1).
• Choose icon alignment for every taskbar position: Top-aligned or centered when the taskbar is on the left or right, and left-aligned or centered when the taskbar is on the top or bottom.
• Use Start, Search, and other flyouts relative to the taskbar location: For example, when the taskbar is on the top, Start opens from the top (see figure 2).
• See every window at a glance: When using a vertical taskbar with “Never combine” taskbar buttons and show labels enabled, each app window appears as a separate labeled button, making it easier to identify and switch between windows (see figure 3).

For people who value vertical screen space, like developers who want to see more of their code at once, moving the taskbar to the side can help reclaim precious room on the screen. If accessibility or ergonomics make the top of the screen easier to reach, you can place the taskbar there. If you rely on the taskbar to keep track of your work, a vertical layout with ungrouped icons can help you stay organized. The choice is yours. [caption id="attachment_178963" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 1) Screenshot of the taskbar in the left-aligned position.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_178956" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 2) Screenshot of the taskbar in the top-aligned position, with Start opening from the top.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_178957" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 3) Screenshot of the taskbar in the left-aligned position with buttons never combined and labels shown.[/caption] To change the taskbar position, go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors, where you will find the new option alongside taskbar icon alignment. [caption id="attachment_178958" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 4) Screenshot of the new Settings > Personalization > Taskbar page showing the taskbar position options.[/caption] We’re excited to hear your feedback. We’re still working through additional visual polish, performance improvements, and a few known issues, and there are also some features that are not yet included in this release but are coming soon:

• Auto-hide and tablet-optimized taskbar are not yet supported in alternate positions.
• Touch gestures for alternate positions are still in progress.
• Search boxes are not yet supported in alternate positions and will appear as a search icon for now.

We are also evaluating additional features like different taskbar positions per monitor and drag and drop. Our focus is to deliver the core functionality you need while keeping the experience simple, predictable, and free from accidental taskbar movement.

Smaller taskbar

Windows 11 introduced a roomier taskbar to support more states and features while also improving touch targets. On smaller screens, that extra height can take away from your usable workspace. We are adding the option to switch to a more compact taskbar for times when every pixel counts. With this update, when small taskbar is enabled, you get smaller icons, a shorter taskbar, and more vertical space for your apps (see video below). No restart or sign-out is required. This experience is rolling out today in the Experimental channel. To change your taskbar size, go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors > Show smaller taskbar buttons. When set to Always, both the icons and the taskbar height become smaller. [embed]https://youtu.be/pvE2gyWnVHA[/embed]

Putting you in control of Start

There is a unique Start for everyone, whether you want a minimal experience with just your pinned apps, quick access to recent files, everything in one place, or something in between. We are making changes in two areas to support this. First, we are giving you easier ways to shape your Start menu. Second, we are improving the quality of what appears there by default.

More control over your layout

Today, customizing Start can require navigating multiple settings in different places. Turning off the Recommended section involves toggling several settings, and clearing pinned apps means unpinning them one by one. We are simplifying this experience. Over the coming weeks, Insiders will get:

• Section-level toggles to independently show or hide Pinned, Recommended, and All. One toggle per section that is simple and clear.
• A separate control for file recommendations. Today, turning off Recommended in Start also turns off jump lists and recent files in File Explorer. With this change, you can disable file recommendations in Start without affecting recent files in other places.
• Start menu size settings that let you choose your preferred size. Today, Start adapts to your display. With this update, you can choose Small or Large so your preference stays consistent across displays whenever possible.
• The option to hide your name and profile picture in Start for added privacy when sharing your screen, presenting, or streaming.

[caption id="attachment_178960" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 5) Screenshot of the updated Start settings showing the new section-level toggles.[/caption] These controls are designed to work together. If you want a Start menu with just your pinned apps, you can turn off Recommended and All. If you want a full Start that shows everything, you can leave it all on. The goal is simple: it is your choice, and it should be easy to make. [caption id="attachment_178961" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 6) Screenshot showing Start in a minimal "pins only" configuration with hidden name and profile picture.[/caption]

Improving recommendation quality

We are also improving the content that appears in this section for people who choose to keep it on. We are renaming Recommended to Recent to better reflect what the section primarily shows, including recently installed apps and recently used files. We are keeping recently installed apps visible, as this remains one of the primary ways people discover newly installed apps alongside the Microsoft Store. Both users and developers have told us this visibility is important. In addition, we are improving file relevancy. We are refining which files appear and how they are ordered to reduce less relevant items and better reflect what you have been working on.

What’s next

Everything described will roll out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel over the coming weeks, including several in today's flight. We have talked about earning trust through steady and visible progress. Start and taskbar are where that trust is tested most, every time you sit down at your PC. Please share your feedback in Feedback Hub by pressing WIN + F. The Windows Insider community plays a critical role in shaping Windows, and as these features become available, we encourage you to explore them and share what is working and what is not. This work is ongoing, and our goal is to build it together with you. Thanks, Diego Twitter (X): @bacadd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin/in/bacadd [caption id="attachment_178962" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Figure 7) Screenshot showing top-aligned small taskbar with Start in a minimal "pins only" configuration.[/caption]