Don't Panic Labs

08/25/2026

Bill made an executive call on Friday: red is the new blue at Don't Panic Labs.

08/18/2026

Chad Michel got OpenAI's Codex CLI running locally through Ollama. This means no cloud API and no code leaving his machine. Check out how he did it.

Chad Michel shows how to run OpenAI's Codex CLI locally with Ollama, from installing the gpt-oss model to setting up a persistent local profile.

08/04/2026

Read how Chad Michel treats the TanStack Query cache as the source of truth for the UI and lets the server catch up whenever it can.

Chad Michel builds an offline-first flow with TanStack Query, treating the local cache as the source of truth so the UI stays fast even when the network drops.

07/29/2026

You can tell a kitchen is messy without being a chef. The same goes for code.

Chad Michel wrote a field guide that walks through thirteen smells you can catch without knowing a programming language.

A field guide to spotting bad code without writing any. Thirteen smells anyone can catch.

07/22/2026

For Chad, VMs felt like overkill and Kubernetes was too much infrastructure for the project. But an Azure App Service with containers hit the sweet spot.

Check out his post as he shares how he deployed a single container bundling the Angular frontend, NestJS API, and Caddy, all built in GitHub Actions and pushed to Azure Container Registry.

Chad Michel walks through running a single Docker container on Azure App Service: Angular, NestJS, and Caddy, built in GitHub Actions with zero-downtime swaps.

07/16/2026

Bill Udell has been watching organizations reach for a Responsible Use Policy before they have decided what they actually believe about AI.

In his latest post, he makes the case that governance comes second. Leadership has to decide who the organization intends to become first.

Most organizations start their AI work by writing a policy. Bill Udell argues that governance comes second. Leadership has to decide who you intend to become first.

07/14/2026

Three words have cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars: "it's just config."

Chad Michel covers why teams skip review, testing, and staged rollouts for config changes, even though those changes carry the same risk as code.

Config changes skip the reviews and tests code gets. Chad Michel breaks down Knight Capital, CrowdStrike, and Cloudflare to show why that gap is costly.

07/07/2026

The teams who win the next era of software won't have the smartest agents, they'll have drawn the clearest line between human judgment and machine action.

This is what Chad Michel argues in his latest post. He also walks through four new jobs interface designers have to solve once software can act on its own.

AI agents are changing what an interface is for. Here's how to draw the line between human judgment and machine action.

07/06/2026

We love spreading the word when other Lincoln organizations are collecting items for those in our community.

Home Real Estate is holding a donation drive through July 23rd benefiting the largest back-to-school event in Lincoln.

Items can be dropped off at their Midtown Office (5322 O St), Monday-Friday 8am-5pm.

Their most needed items include:

Backpacks (new, quality backpacks in a variety of styles for ages 5-19 and all genders)
Pencils ( #2 lead pencils/pack of 10)
Pens (Blue or black ink/pack of 10)
Folders (Single file folders)
Pencil pouches
Scissors (Blunt tip child scissors)
Basic children’s calculators
3 subject college-ruled notebooks
Binders (1" 3-ring binders)
Mini staplers (Including staples)

07/02/2026

Our office will be quiet this Friday, July 3.

We are taking an extended holiday weekend so our team can relax and spend time with the people they care about. And since Independence Day marks our nation’s 250th this year, we have a great reason to slow down and appreciate a long stretch of summer.

However you spend it, whether that involves fireworks, a backyard grill, or doing nothing at all, we hope you get some genuine downtime.

We’ll be back at it on Monday, July 6.