Zencoder

Most developers use AI coding tools like autocomplete on steroids. That's leaving a LOT on the table. Zencoder is running a 3-week AI Developer Program and it might be the most practical thing you do this year. Here's the structure: 📚 Week 1 — 4 live workshops on AI-native dev workflows 🛠️ Weeks 2–3 — You build something real, with support 🏆 Demo Day on May 4 — $500 in prizes for top projects What you'll actually learn: → How to think like a director, not a typist → Running parallel agents with Blast Mode & MCPs → Custom workflows + scheduled automation → AI-assisted debugging across multi-repo codebases No fluff. No theory for theory's sake. Just skills you can use immediately. This is for: ✅ Developers curious about AI tools but not sure where to start ✅ Indie hackers building dev tools & productivity apps ✅ Professional devs who want to bring AI-native practices to their team ✅ Open source contributors Applications close April 10, 2026 — and they're rolling, so earlier = better. 👉 Apply here: https://tally.so/r/rjVVdp 👾 Join the Discord community: https://lnkd.in/gQNyFakj Don't just watch AI change software development. Be the developer who actually knows how to use it. More info here: https://lnkd.in/gfEKURqY #AI #SoftwareDevelopment #AITools #IndieHacker #OpenSource #Zencoder

I've been a team lead for 10+ years. For me it was always about helping the team thrive — removing obstacles, providing guidance, and yes, doing less hands-on coding. A familiar pain for most engineering leads. In the pre-AI era, a team lead's leverage was limited: drive architecture, improve processes, coach engineers. You could try adding automated quality checks, but there was never enough time — and frankly, the ceiling on useful automation was low. AI has completely changed this equation. Now I can drastically boost my team's performance by crafting agent rules, building agent skills, and setting up automated AI reviews. Automation that used to take weeks — or never happened at all — now takes an hour or less. I used to spend time teaching every new engineer the same design patterns, testing best practices, and small but important conventions. Now I write it all into a shared AGENTS.md — and instead focus on coaching engineers on AI-first coding. At Zencoder, I have an additional advantage: a huge portion of what I build to help my team can be shipped directly to our customers. Every internal improvement becomes a product feature. → I review a teammate's code — and simultaneously improve our agentic skill for comprehensive review. First it helps me, then becomes automated PR review for the whole company, then ships to customers. → I fix a bug — and refine our bug-fixing workflow with each one. That workflow then goes to the team, and later to customers. Every cycle compounds. What excites me most: state-of-the-art approaches to AI coding emerge every week, and we're among the first to try them, adopt them, and turn them into a product. Working with tomorrow's technology isn't an abstraction here — it's daily practice. Ownership at Zencoder isn't a buzzword. It's using what you build, every day, with real levers to change it. If this resonates — we're growing and looking for people who want to shape the future of AI-first coding. Come check us out at https://zencoder.ai/

JUST RELEASED: "Google Maps" for codebases👇 Zencoder just built a codebase explorer with CopilotKit: Paste a GitHub URL, get a real dependency graph and ask it anything. How it works: - Every file is fetched live from GitHub - Dependency graphs are built from real import statements - LLM updates the UI live, no text replies, just actions - Runs completely free with Ollama Source Code: https://lnkd.in/gMes79dD Read more: https://lnkd.in/gRS7a2py Shoutout to Karuna Tata for building this 🪁

For a long time, coding was something I only did in pet projects. I always wanted to bring it into my main work because designing something and actually delivering it to users are two very different things. Not just “here’s the mockup”, but something real that creates value. Recently, that finally changed. At Zencoder, I started writing code almost every day. Instead of handing things off, I just keep going until it’s live and in users’ hands. A big part of this is how we work. There’s no strict hierarchy, everyone builds. That removes a lot of friction and helps us move really fast. It also changes the feeling of ownership. You’re not responsible for just one step, you own the outcome. Somewhere along the way, I realized I’m no longer just a Product Designer. I’m closer to a design engineer now.

We spent $50K benchmarking 15 AI models on SWE-Bench Pro. A bug in our eval harness wasted $20K of runs... but accidentally produced the most revealing findings of the entire study. The short version: standard benchmarks hide real differences between models. Our buggy setup exposed them. https://lnkd.in/gQn8D8RF