Journal: Traveling URL Shortener App, Stack Setup, Custom Agents

Travel Days (Low Output)

The past couple of days were mostly travel and life-admin. Couldn't get much done on anything. Today I was pretty tired coming back to it, so I decided to just continue with the course as much as I can and call it a day. No shame in that — slow progress is still progress.

Getting the Project Off the Ground

Started a new project today — a URL shortener app. The approach here is a bit different from how I'd normally do things: I'm using whiteboarding alongside a Udemy course called GitHub Copilot Beginner to Pro to build and treat this as a proof of concept at the same time.

First things first — scaffolded a new Next.js project.

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Setting Up Authentication with Clerk

Next up was signing up for Clerk for authentication. The process was pretty smooth — created an account, set up a notification, selected the framework, and copied the integration prompt that Clerk provides.

The nice thing about Clerk is that it ships with a ready-made prompt you can just hand straight to GitHub Copilot Chat, and it handles the integration for you.

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Database Setup — Neon.tech & Drizzle ORM

Spinning up Neon

Created an account on neon.com and set up a new project there. Neon gives you a free-tier server-less Postgres database, which is perfect for this kind of proof-of-concept work. No overhead, no cost to get started.

Drizzle ORM — The Manual Route

This is where things got a little bumpy. The course has you follow all the steps manually to connect Drizzle ORM with Neon, and honestly — it felt off compared to how the Clerk section was handled.

Maybe the reason Clerk was smoother is that Clerk actually ships a ready-made integration prompt. Drizzle just doesn't have that, so there's nothing to hand off to the agent. That context makes it make sense, even if it slowed things down.

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What I Learned Today — Custom Agents & Instruction Files in VS Code

The video I watched today was actually really useful. It walked through how to create custom agents and custom prompts inside VS Code, and then use those inside GitHub Copilot Chat.

The workflow goes something like this:

1. Create custom prompts in VS Code

2. Use those prompts to generate instruction files

3. Store instruction files inside a /docs folder in the project

4. Reference those files in AGENTS.md file so Copilot picks them up automatically

This is actually a pretty powerful pattern. Instead of re-explaining the project context every time you open Copilot Chat, you bake the context into files that get pulled in automatically. It keeps the agent grounded in what the project actually is.

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What's Next

The plan for tomorrow is to start putting those instruction files to actual use — generate some real components and hopefully get the dashboard pages started. That's where things should start feeling like a real app rather than a setup exercise.