Russ McKendrick

DevOps and cloud author. 185 posts published on russ.cloud, plus 14+ technical books on Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and Infrastructure as Code.

Where else to find me

What I write about

AI Commit Meets Apple's On-Device Model

macOS 27 ships with an fm CLI for Apple's on-device Foundation Model, so I added it to AI Commit as a provider, 8,192-token context window and all.

9 Aug 202610 min read

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.

19 Jul 202611 min read

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.

12 Jul 20268 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

13 Jun 202611 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.

10 May 202611 min read

codebase-memory-mcp: Giving Claude Code (and Codex) a Map

A real Codex session with codebase-memory-mcp cost me 30p. How I set it up for Claude Code and Codex, and whether it's safe to run on your code.

1 May 202616 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.

19 Apr 20268 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.

11 Apr 202610 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.

5 Apr 20266 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.

3 Apr 20267 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.

1 Feb 20268 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.