Alex Plate

AI dev @JetBrains (ex-core dev), @IdeaVim. Building solo on the side — balancing indie passion with a full-time job. and more

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

I have a full-time job and work a lot on personal projects. The question I keep coming back to: how to combine the two, not burn out, and make real progress on each. I've built a flow that works — and I keep refining it. Dumping my thoughts here as I figure it out.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@ChromiumDev Wow, definitely will try that in one of my extensions.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@seraleev I was like, “No, it seems more like a unification of the UI for iPads and iPhones,” but man, this split…

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@ivesparrowai I like when people don’t just throw AI at everything and hope it’ll somehow swim, but instead verify where it works well and where it doesn’t. Nice work!

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@maks6361 Congrats and welcome! This spring and summer have been quite mild, but don’t be fooled—make sure you find a place with A/C in every room. Also, Limassol is usually about 5°C hotter than Paphos, and Larnaca is a bit hotter as well.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

Wow, X has a special like animation for #WWDC26

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@frboulais From 600 to 700 in three days. Wow, that's a great speed, congrats!

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

Website Downloader (https://t.co/ByVocmpe7R) is growing again after users dropped off following its sudden removal. The one thing I’m grateful for is that I didn’t lose a product with 100k+ users.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@seraleev True. The killer feature isn’t pointing—it’s navigation. Once you get used to gesture-driven workflow, a mouse feels one-dimensional.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

If anyone asked me what the most hidden feature of @intellijidea is, I'd definitely say double-Alt.

Hit double-Alt, then press Up/Down to create multiple carets in the same column.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@adamlyttleapps I recently started giving Claude Code access to statistics services when I need to figure something out. It turns out it’s great at understanding questions and extracting the right data—something I never managed to achieve with predefined graphs. Nice work on the visualization!

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

I've never used compaction anymore since Claude Code introduced 1M context. This is enough for my largest tasks.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

https://t.co/1s4FW00zOn

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

I'm the developer of XPath Tester (cneomjecgakdfoeehmmmoiklncdiodmh), a Chrome extension for QA engineers, developers, and automation folks to quickly test XPath and CSS selectors right on real web pages.

My focus on quality showed up in the ratings, and I can't describe how happy I was to get reviews from users thanking me for it.

Last week, it was removed from the store with no warning. I only got a very generic "Spam policy" reason — no details about what was actually wrong or what I needed to fix.

I filed an appeal, but the response looked like a standard automated reply. After that, I uploaded a new version with changes to the things I thought might be the problem, but it was rejected again. Still no clear explanation.

The hardest part is that real users — including paying ones — rely on this extension every day. They write asking what happened, and honestly, I don't know what to tell them.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@adamlyttleapps Yeah, that’s a painful experience. I’ve got a couple if days ago my chrome extension with 120.000 users removed without any notice, still don’t know what’s the problem.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@geminicli Trying to map the Google AI brand tree: Gemini (the model), Antigravity (the agent platform), Gemini CLI (gone), Antigravity CLI (new), Gemini Code Assist (still here for enterprise).

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

@googlechrome just removed my extension with 120,000 users — one day after sending a “you have 30 days to fix the issues” notice. I still don’t understand what the problem with the extension was.

[Alex Plate @AlexPl292]

Today I came across an odd captcha, and I was like, " What? "... Luckily, there is ChatGPT to help me with that.

[IdeaVim @ideavim]

Did you know that IdeaVim now supports :autocmd?

Hope you didn't wait too long 🫠