Tech
AI coding assistants in 2026: where they help, where they hurt
Three years into the rollout of AI-assisted programming, a working developer's assessment of what these tools have actually changed in the practice of software engineering.
Kavita Iyer
Tech Editor · Consumer technology and apps
Kavita Iyer covers consumer technology for The Curated Weekly. Her beat ranges from smart home and personal computing to the apps people actually keep on their phones for years. She prefers long-term testing over launch-week impressions, and her reviews emphasize what an app or device looks like at the six-month mark.
Expertise
- Consumer software reviews
- Smart home
- Mobile apps
- Long-term reliability tracking
Bylines have appeared at
- CNET (former staff)
- The Verge (freelance)
- Wirecutter (contributing)
Recent reporting
Tech
The iPhone 16 Pro, six months later: where it has aged well, and where it hasn't
A long-term review of Apple's flagship phone after six months of daily use, with attention to the parts of the experience launch reviews are not built to surface.
Tech
The best budget laptops of 2026, after eight weeks of working on them
Five laptops under $900 tested as a primary work machine, ranked by build quality, sustained performance, screen, keyboard, and how they hold up in week six.
Opinion
The case against feature creep in consumer software
The apps we used to love are now full of features we never asked for, paywalls behind features that used to be free, and 'AI' overlays that solve problems we did not have. A working argument for software that does less.
Tech
The best e-readers of 2026
Five e-readers tested over a six-week reading window, ranked by reading experience, library compatibility, and how they hold up to actual sustained reading rather than spec-sheet comparison.
Tech
Wi-Fi 7 routers tested: do you actually need one in 2026?
Four prominent Wi-Fi 7 routers benchmarked across a six-week home-network test, with the unfashionable answer that most households can comfortably wait.
Health
How AI photo recognition for food actually works — and where it still goes wrong
Convolutional networks, portion-size estimation, and the unsolved problem of mixed dishes. A plain-English explainer for readers who want to understand what their phone is actually doing when it counts the calories on a plate.
Tech
What your smart-home camera is actually sending to the cloud
A look at the data practices of the most widely sold consumer security cameras in 2026, with attention to what is encrypted, what is retained, and what gets shared with law enforcement.
Health
How accurate are consumer sleep trackers, really?
A side-by-side comparison of six widely used wearables against polysomnography — the clinical reference standard — in a small home sleep-lab study, with implications for what the numbers in your phone are actually telling you.
Tech
Anker's charging lineup, ranked: which ones are worth buying
Anker now sells more than forty different chargers, banks, and cables under at least three sub-brand names. A working tester's guide to the ones that earn their place in a backpack and the ones that don't.
Tech
USB-C cables, ranked: which ones do what they say they do
A surprisingly contentious category. The USB-C marking on a cable does not actually tell you what the cable will do, and a meaningful fraction of cables on the market are not what they appear to be.