My Starship Prompt Revisited: Making Blocks Vanish Cleanly
A follow-up to my Starship setup: how I got the status and AI blocks to appear only when they matter, without leaving a powerline stub behind.
10 min read
Russ McKendrick
DevOps and cloud author. 184 posts published on russ.cloud, plus 14+ technical books on Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and Infrastructure as Code.
What I write about
Recent posts
Token Use: Coach Mode and a Week of Releases
A week after Token Use hit 1.0.0 by cutting features, it's on 1.2.2. Coach mode, a Rust port of Microsoft's AI-Engineering-Coach rules, full-text scrollback, an MCP server, and a 3D graph.
11 min read
A Catch-Up: terminal-svg and Token Use v1
Two projects worth writing about: terminal-svg, a new Rust tool for pixel-perfect terminal screenshots, and Token Use finally reaching v1
8 min read
Playing with Headroom: Compressing the Context Going to My AI Coding Agents
I spent a few days running Headroom, a local proxy that promises to cut the tokens your AI coding agent sends to the provider. The savings are real, but they're not where the dashboard first makes you think they are.
11 min read
codebase-memory-mcp: Giving Claude Code (and Codex) a Map
A short look at codebase-memory-mcp, an MCP server that indexes your codebase into a queryable knowledge graph so Claude Code or Codex can answer structural questions without grepping every file.
9 min read
Counting the Cost of Vibe Coding
A local-first dashboard for tracking AI coding tool spend across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini CLI - with a TUI, a desktop app, and zero API keys required.
16 min read
Is my blog Agent-Ready?
Running russ.cloud through isitagentready.com and wiring up the checks that actually make sense for a static blog - Link headers, Content Signals, agent-skills discovery, llms.txt, and a tiny Cloudflare Worker to serve markdown on demand.
8 min read
Introducing AI Commit
A Rust CLI I built to stop writing terrible commit messages - aic generates AI-powered commit messages, PR drafts, diff reviews, and repo visualisations from your staged changes.
10 min read
Introducing Hosts Butler
A terminal-based hosts file manager built in Rust that I wrote to stop manually editing /etc/hosts with a text editor and hoping I didn't break anything.
6 min read
Creating Custom Skills for Copilot Cowork
Copilot Cowork just landed in Microsoft's Frontier preview programme, and one of its most useful features is the ability to extend it with your own custom skills stored in OneDrive. Here's how to create one.
7 min read
Introducing ssl-toolkit
A comprehensive SSL/TLS diagnostic tool built in Rust that I created to replace my ever-growing document of random certificate checking notes.
8 min read
OpenClaw: Giving Claude a Body (and a Telegram Bot)
A quick guide to installing OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that gives LLMs persistence, tools, and messaging - turning a chatbot into an actual assistant.
7 min read
