Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Tips and games for ROG Xbox Ally handhelds

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Those of you who pre-ordered the new Windows-powered ROG Xbox Ally could be holding it in your hands when it's available Oct.16. What will you do with it when you get it? Luckily, Xbox Wire has two posts that will help make the most out of your new handheld gaming device. Jeff Rubenstein delivers tips such as setting up the fingerprint reader, mastering menus and browsing the games library. You can also find out how to: add titles from leading PC storefronts, play without Wi-Fi and personalize your setup. Xbox Wire also has a helpful post about games you can play right away on your ROG Xbox Ally or ROG Xbox Ally X. They’ve put together a list of some of their favorite games that are handheld optimized or mostly compatible, such as DOOM: The Dark Ages and Forza Horizon 5.
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alvinashcraft
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PowerToys 0.95 is here: new Light Switch utility, faster Command Palette, and Peek with Spacebar

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Hero image of PowerToys 0.95

New month, new release! This one’s packed with quality-of-life improvements, performance boosts, and a bunch of long-standing community requests finally checked off the list — all while keeping the focus on fundamentals like speed and reliability! Get the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or heading to the release page. Let’s dive in!

🆕 Automatically switch between light and dark-mode with Light Switch

Meet Light Switch, a brand-new utility that automatically switches your PC between light and dark mode! You can set custom start and end times, or let Light Switch handle it for you by using the sunrise and sunset times for your location. Want it to start a little earlier or later? Just tweak the offset to your liking. You can also choose whether the shell, apps, or both should switch – and, in case you want to toggle on the fly; just configure a keyboard shortcut

LS2 image

PR: #41987

⚡Command Palette goes brrr

We’ve heard you — you want Command Palette to find things faster than ever. This release brings a brand-new fuzzy matcher with smarter fallbacks that makes search results both faster and more relevant.

Under the hood, we’ve made several key improvements:

  • Removed ranking for fallback extensions (except Calculator and Run), so they now appear at the bottom of results.
  • Fixed an issue where Command Palette was throwing a lot of exceptions during searches — especially when multiple extensions were installed. This was throttling performance quite a bit.
  • Added logic to cancel previous searches when you type something new, so only your latest query is processed.
  • Limited app results in the All Apps extension to a default of 10 (configurable to 0, 1, 5, or 10).

Quick comparison of the fallback improvements:

Together, these changes make Command Palette feel snappier, more efficient, and way smoother to use. These aren’t lab-grade benchmarks, but here’s a peek at some real-world numbers our dev team gathered while testing search speed improvements:

Search term 0.94 0.95
access 633ms 113ms
copilot 257ms 78ms
github 102ms 101ms
4*4 124ms 3ms

Beyond performance, we’ve also polished up the experience with: * A new gallery/grid view for search results * An option to toggle animations on or off * Tons of bug fixes and small tweaks throughout.

PR: #41959

👀 Peek with the Space bar

Another community favorite: you can now open Peek **by simply pressing the **Space bar — no more custom shortcut required! This is now the default behavior for Peek going forward.

Peek now supports space bar activation

PR: #41867

🖱 Find My Mouse now supports transparency

Another big community ask: you can now make the Find My Mouse highlight fully transparent. Just head to the Appearance section and adjust the transparency slider for the cursor color — great for when you want a subtler effect.

MouseHighlighter now support transparency

PR: #41701

🎹 Ignore shortcut conflicts and unassign shortcuts

Last release introduced shortcut conflict detection, and we’ve expanded on it this time. You can now ignore specific conflicts directly from the conflict dialog so they no longer show up as a conflict.

The shortcut conflicts dialog now allows you ignore a shortcut

We’ve also added the option to completely unassign shortcuts in the configuration dialog using the Clear button. This makes it easy to remove shortcuts for any utilities you don’t use.

Clear shortcut now supported

PR: #41729

🧩 Other notable changes

  • Mouse Pointer Crosshairs now lets you show only the horizontal line, vertical line, or both.
  • Added support for Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3, so it’s easier to setup a new device with the same settings.
  • Gliding Cursor can now be canceled with the Esc key.
  • Added a Welsh layout with acute, grave, and dieresis variants for vowels in Quick Accent.
  • ZoomIt now supports smooth image zooming.

✨ Big thanks to the community

A huge shoutout to Jiří Polášek (@jiripolasek) for contributing over 20 pull requests in this release! And of course, a big thank-you to everyone else who contributed — we couldn’t do it without you! Thanks @chakrik73, @daverayment, @DevLGuilherme, @foxmsft,, @michaeljolley, @mikeclayton, @mikehall-ms, @mKpwnz, @PesBandi and @samrueby for your pull requests!

🚀 What’s next?

We are planning some nice new features and improvements for the next releases – a revamped Keyboard Manager UI, custom endpoint and local model support for Advanced Paste, Commmand Palette improvements and a brand-new Shortcut Guide experience! Stay tuned!

We’re always happy to get your feedback and contributions – whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or a pull request. Head over to the PowerToys repo to jump in.

The full release notes can be found here.

🔗 Useful links

The post PowerToys 0.95 is here: new Light Switch utility, faster Command Palette, and Peek with Spacebar appeared first on Windows Command Line.

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These are the Office icons Microsoft rejected

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The Word concepts next to the final icon on the right.

Microsoft is busy rolling out new curvy and colorful new Office icons, and now it’s revealing a set of design concepts it experimented with before finalizing these new icons. Some of the concepts are radically different from what Microsoft is shipping, with design explorations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that more closely resemble the Office for Mac icons of the past.

The Word concept icons (above) include a notepad-like experiment and different ways to visualize stacks of paper, or documents. Microsoft experimented with making the Word lettering the key part of the icon, and also versions where the lettering blends in or is totally absent. Microsoft eventually settled on a design that has three horizontal bars instead of four, and it’s using versions of the icon with and without lettering.

Microsoft focuses heavily on the use of cells in its existing and new Excel icons, and the concept ones rarely diverge from this. I really like the X icon though, but the rest look similar to what Microsoft landed on for the final icon.

PowerPoint has always been about slides, and Microsoft experimented with a variety of ways of visualizing that for its latest PowerPoint icon. A couple of concepts focus on the lettering, turning into a ribbon-like P or a P letter with a pie chart hanging off of it. The final icon design is a lot more tame though, with a slightly more rounded and colorful take on the current PowerPoint icon.

All of Microsoft’s new Office icons — including new Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and OneNote designs — are starting to roll out across Windows and iOS at the moment. Microsoft appears to be using the versions with letters in Windows, but for iOS it’s opting for icons without the distinctive letters.

What do you think? Are there any concept versions you prefer over the final designs Microsoft picked?

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alvinashcraft
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Magic Words: Programming the Next Generation of AI Applications

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“Strange was obliged to invent most of the magic he did, working from general principles and half-remembered stories from old books.”

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Fairy tales, myths, and fantasy fiction are full of magic spells. You say “abracadabra” and something profound happens.1 Say “open sesame” and the door swings open.

It turns out that this is also a useful metaphor for what happens with large language models.

I first got this idea from David Griffiths’s O’Reilly course on using AI to boost your productivity. He gave a simple example. You can tell ChatGPT “Organize my task list using the Eisenhower four-sided box.” And it just knows what to do, even if you yourself know nothing about General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s approach to decision making. David then suggests his students instead try “Organize my task list using Getting Things Done,” or just “Use GTD.” Each of those phrases is shorthand for systems of thought, practices, and conventions that the model has learned from human culture.

These are magic words. They’re magic not because they do something unworldly and unexpected but because they have the power to summon patterns that have been encoded in the model. The words act as keys, unlocking context and even entire workflows.

We all use magic words in our prompts. We say something like “Update my resume” or “Draft a Substack post” without thinking how much detailed prompting we’d have to do to create that output if the LLM didn’t already know the magic word.

Every field has a specialized language whose terms are known only to its initiates. We can be fanciful and pretend they are magic spells, but the reality is that each of them is really a kind of fuzzy function call to an LLM, bringing in a body of context and unlocking a set of behaviors and capabilities. When we ask an LLM to write a program in Javascript rather than Python, we are using one of these fuzzy function calls. When we ask for output as an .md file, we are doing the same. Unlike a function call in a traditional programming language, it doesn’t always return the same result, which is why developers have an opportunity to enhance the magic.

From Prompts to Applications

The next light bulb went off for me in a conversation with Claire Vo, the creator of an AI application called ChatPRD. Claire spent years as a product manager, and as soon as ChatGPT became available, began using it to help her write product requirement documents or PRDs. Every product manager knows what a PRD is. When Claire prompted ChatGPT to “write a PRD,” it didn’t need a long preamble. That one acronym carried decades of professional practice. But Claire went further. She refined her prompts, improved them, and taught ChatGPT how to think like her. Over time, she had trained a system, not at the model level, but at the level of context and workflow.

Next, Claire turned her workflow into a product. That product is a software interface that wraps up a number of related magic words into a useful package. It controls access to her customized magic spell, so to speak. Claire added detailed prompts, integrations with other tools, access control, and a whole lot of traditional programming in a next-generation application that uses a mix of traditional software code and “magical” fuzzy function calls to an LLM. ChatPRD even interviews users to learn more about their goals, customizing the application for each organization and use case.

Claire’s quickstart guide to ChatPRD is a great example of what a magic-word (fuzzy function call) application looks like.

You can also see how magic words are crafted into magic spells and how these spells are even part of the architecture of applications like Claude Code through the explorations of developers like Jesse Vincent and Simon Willison.

In “How I’m Using Coding Agents in September, 2025,” Jesse first describes how his claude.md file provides a base prompt that “encodes a bunch of process documentation and rules that do a pretty good job keeping Claude on track.” And then his workflow calls on a bunch of specialized prompts he has created (i.e., “spells” that give clearer and more personalized meaning to specific magic words) like “brainstorm,” “plan,” “architect,” “implement,” “debug,” and so on. Note how inside these prompts, he may use additional magic words like DRY, YAGNI, and TDD, which refer to specific programming methodologies. For example, here’s his planning prompt (boldface mine):

Great. I need your help to write out a comprehensive implementation plan.

Assume that the engineer has zero context for our codebase and questionable
taste. document everything they need to know. which files to touch for each
task, code, testing, docs they might need to check. how to test it.give
them the whole plan as bite-sized tasks. DRY. YAGNI. TDD. frequent commits.

Assume they are a skilled developer, but know almost nothing about our
toolset or problem domain. assume they don't know good test design very
well.

please write out this plan, in full detail, into docs/plans/

But Jesse didn’t stop there. He built a project called Superpowers, which uses Claude’s recently announced plug-in architecture to “give Claude Code superpowers with a comprehensive skills library of proven techniques, patterns, and tools.” Announcing the project, he wrote:

Skills are what give your agents Superpowers. The first time they really popped up on my radar was a few weeks ago when Anthropic rolled out improved Office document creation. When the feature rolled out, I went poking around a bit – I asked Claude to tell me all about its new skills. And it was only too happy to dish…. [Be sure to follow this link! – TOR]

One of the first skills I taught Superpowers was How to create skills. That has meant that when I wanted to do something like add git worktree workflows to Superpowers, it was a matter of describing how I wanted the workflows to go…and then Claude put the pieces together and added a couple notes to the existing skills that needed to clue future-Claude into using worktrees.

After reading Jesse’s post, Simon Willison did a bit more digging into the original document handling skills that Claude had announced and that had sparked Jesse’s brainstorm. He noted:

Skills are more than just prompts though: the repository also includes dozens of pre-written Python scripts for performing common operations.

 pdf/scripts/fill_fillable_fields.py for example is a custom CLI tool that uses pypdf to find and then fill in a bunch of PDF form fields, specified as JSON, then render out the resulting combined PDF.

This is a really sophisticated set of tools for document manipulation, and I love that Anthropic have made those visible—presumably deliberately—to users of Claude who know how to ask for them.

You can see what’s happening here. Magic words are being enhanced and given a more rigorous definition, and new ones are being added to what, in fantasy tales, they call a “grimoire,” or book of spells. Microsoft calls such spells “metacognitive recipes,” a wonderful term that ought to stick, though for now I’m going to stick with my fanciful analogy to magic.

At O’Reilly, we’re working with a very different set of magic words. For example, we’re building a system for precisely targeted competency-based learning, through which our customers can skip what they already know, master what they need, and prove what they’ve learned. It also gives corporate learning system managers the ability to assign learning goals and to measure the ROI on their investment.

It turns out that there are dozens of learning frameworks (and that is itself a magic word). In the design of our own specialized learning framework, we’re invoking Bloom’s taxonomy, SFIA, and the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. But when a customer says, “We love your approach, but we use LTEM,” we can invoke that framework instead. Every corporate customer also has its own specialized tech stack. So we are exploring how to use magic words to let whatever we build adapt dynamically not only to our end users’ learning needs but to the tech stack and to the learning framework that already exists at each company.

That would be a nightmare if we had to support dozens of different learning frameworks using traditional processes. But the problem seems much more tractable if we are able to invoke the right magic words. That’s what I mean when I say that magic words are a crucial building block in the next generation of application programming.

The Architecture of Magic

Here’s the important thing: Magic isn’t arbitrary. In every mythic tradition, it has structure, discipline, and cost. The magician’s power depends on knowing the right words, pronounced in the right way, with the right intent.

The same is true for AI systems. The effectiveness of our magic words depends on context, grounding, and feedback loops that give the model reliable information about the world.

That’s why I find the emerging ecosystem of AI applications so fascinating. It’s about providing the right context to the model. It’s about defining vocabularies, workflows, and roles that expose and make sense of the model’s abilities. It’s about turning implicit cultural knowledge into explicit systems of interaction.

We’re only at the beginning. But just as early programmers learned to build structured software without spelling out exact machine instructions, today’s AI practitioners are learning to build structured reasoning systems out of fuzzy language patterns.

Magic words aren’t just a poetic image. They’re the syntax of a new kind of computing. As people become more comfortable with LLMs, they will pass around the magic words they have learned as power user tricks. Meanwhile, developers will wrap more advanced capabilities around those that come with any given LLM once you know the right words to invoke their power. Each application will be built around a shared vocabulary that encodes its domain knowledge. Back in 2022, Mike Loukides called these systems “formal informal languages.” That is, they are spoken in human language, but do better when you apply a bit of rigor.

And at least for the foreseeable future, developers will write “shims” between the magic words that control the LLMs and the more traditional programming tools and techniques that interface with existing systems, much as Claire did with ChatPRD. But eventually we’ll see true AI to AI communication.

Magic words and the spells built around them are only the beginning. Once people start using them in common, they become protocols. They define how humans and AI systems cooperate, and how AI systems cooperate with each other.

We can already see this happening. Frameworks like LangChain or the Model Context Protocol (MCP) formalize how context and tools are shared. Teams build agentic workflows that depend on a common vocabulary of intent. What is an MCP server, after all, but a mapping of a fuzzy function call into a set of predictable tools and services available at a given endpoint?

In other words, what was once a set of magic spells is becoming infrastructure. When enough people use the same magic words, they stop being magic and start being standards—the building blocks for the next generation of software.

We can already see this progression with MCP. There are three distinct kinds of MCP servers. Some, like Playwright MCP, are designed to make it easier for AIs to interface with applications originally designed for interactive human use. Others, like the GitHub MCP Server, are designed to make it easier for AIs to interface with existing APIs, that is, with interfaces originally designed to be called by traditional programs. But some are designed as a frontend for a true AI-to-AI conversation. Other protocols, like A2A, are already optimized for this third use case.

But in each case, an MCP server is really a dictionary (or in magic terms, a spellbook)  that explains the magic words that it understands and how to invoke them. As Jesse Vincent put it to me after reading a draft of this piece:

The part that feels the most like magic spells is the part that most MCP authors do incredibly poorly. Each tool has a “description” field that tells the LLM how you use the tool. That description field is read and internalized by the LLM and changes how it behaves. Anthropic are particularly good at tool descriptions and most everybody else, in my experience, is…less good.

In many ways, publishing the prompts, tool descriptions, context, and skills that add functionality to LLMs may be a more important frontier of open source AI than open weights. It’s important that we treat our enhancements to magic words not as proprietary secrets but as shared cultural artifacts. The more open and participatory our vocabularies are, the more inclusive and creative the resulting ecosystem will be.


Footnotes

  1. While often associated today with stage magic and cartoons, this magic word was apparently used from Roman times as a healing spell. One proposed etymology suggests that it comes from the Aramaic for “I create as I speak.”



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Think a Recruiter Will Land You Your Dream Job? Read This First

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If I had a dollar for every time an engineering leader came to me saying, “I don’t need coaching, I just need someone to help me find my next job”, I could retire tomorrow.

Let’s clear something up: recruiters do not find jobs for people.

That’s not their job. That’s not who pays them. That’s not the incentive structure they operate in.

Recruiters find people for jobs, not jobs for people. And if you miss that distinction, you’ll set yourself up for frustration in your job search.

Here’s what every engineering leader needs to understand:

By the way, not everything I see in engineering leadership is “safe” for LinkedIn. That’s why I write NSFL rants and trench notes only for my inner circle. If you want the real stories and insights, subscribe here.

#1 – The Recruiter’s Client Is Not You

A recruiter works for the company. Period.

The company pays the fee. The company creates the job spec. The company is the customer.

So yes, a great recruiter might care about you as a person — but the system is designed for them to care about placing someone in an open role. If you happen to be that person, awesome. If not, they’ll move on.

Want the audio / video format of this? Watch below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63mHUywRbFU

#2 – You Don’t Need a Recruiter… You Need Many

When people say, “I’m looking for a recruiter to help me,” I know they don’t understand how the game works.

There isn’t a magical recruiter out there whose job is to be your personal talent agent. That person doesn’t exist.

If recruiters are part of your strategy, you need to build relationships with lots of them. Treat it like networking. The more touchpoints, the more chances you’ll overlap with a live opportunity.

#3 – Recruiters Are Only One Slice of the Pie

Even at the executive level, only a fraction of roles come through recruiters.

The majority of opportunities are unlocked through your network. Conversations. Referrals. Relationships.

So yes, leverage recruiters as one spoke in the wheel, but don’t mistake them for the whole strategy. If all you’re doing is waiting for one recruiter to call, you’re leaving 80%+ of your opportunities untouched.

#4 – Coaching Solves a Different Problem

This is where the recruiter vs. coach conversation gets interesting.

A coach doesn’t “place” you into a job. What I do is equip you with the clarity, courage, and strategy to own your search and accelerate the outcome.

If you’re acting out of desperation, coaching helps you slow down, refocus, and make smart decisions.

If you feel isolated, coaching connects you with community and perspective.

If your confidence is shot, coaching rebuilds it so you show up strong in every interview and networking call.

If you want more than just a new job — if you want a lifestyle upgrade — coaching helps you design that vision and go get it.

Recruiters can’t do that for you. It’s not their role.

Let me leave you with this

Recruiters are not your agent. They will not hustle day and night to find you a job. They’re paid by companies to fill open roles. Full stop.

So stop expecting a recruiter to hand you your dream role on a platter.

Instead:

  • Build relationships with recruiters (plural).
  • Invest in coaching if you want to accelerate and maximize your transition.
  • Most of all, take ownership of your career strategy — don’t outsource it.

Because the truth is, your next opportunity won’t come from “a recruiter.” It’ll come from you showing up with clarity, confidence, and the right system.

And that’s exactly what we do together.

I help engineering leaders design a career strategy that actually works — one that gets you out of stagnation and into the roles and lifestyle you want faster.

If you’ve been relying on recruiters or job boards and not getting traction, let’s change that.

👉 Book a quick career growth audit with me here

We’ll look at where you’re stuck, what’s missing in your approach, and map the next best step for you.

No pressure, just clarity.

Have you ever relied too heavily on recruiters in a job search? What happened? Share in the comments.

The post Think a Recruiter Will Land You Your Dream Job? Read This First appeared first on OACO.

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Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum | Renee Troughton

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Renee Troughton: Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"For the actual product teams, it's not a problem for them... It's more the downstream teams that aren't the product teams, that are still dependencies... They just don't see that work until, hey, we urgently need this."

Renee brings a dual-edged challenge from her current work with dozens of teams across multiple business lines. While quarterly planning happens at a high level, small downstream teams—middleware, AI, data, and even non-technical teams like legal—are not considered in the planning process. These teams experience unexpected work floods with dramatic peaks and troughs throughout the quarter. The product teams are comfortable with ambiguity and incremental delivery, but downstream service teams don't see work coming until it arrives urgently. Through a coaching conversation, Renee and Vasco explore multiple experimental approaches: top-to-bottom stack ranking of initiatives, holding excess capacity based on historical patterns, shared code ownership where downstream teams advise rather than execute changes, and using Theory of Constraints to manage flow into bottleneck teams. They discuss how lack of discovery work compounds the problem, as teams "just start working" without identifying all players who need involvement. The solution requires balancing multiple strategies while maintaining an experimentation mindset, recognizing that complex systems require sensing our way toward solutions rather than predicting them.

Self-reflection Question: Are you actively managing the flow of work to prevent downstream bottlenecks, or are you allowing your "downstream teams" to be repeatedly overwhelmed by last-minute urgent requests?

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn’t just about innovation—it’s about coaching!🔥

Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she’s caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn’t just about the product—it’s about the people.

🚨 Will Angela’s coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

Buy Now on Amazon

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

About Renee Troughton

Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she's helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work.

Follow Renee’s work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast

You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.





Download audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scrummastertoolbox/20251015_Renee_Troughton_W.mp3?dest-id=246429
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