Blog
Notes & writing
Thoughts on software engineering, the things I'm building, and what I learn along the way.
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Performance
Localhost Lies: How We Made the Jutsu Console Twice as Fast
We cut the time it takes the Jutsu console's pages to become usable by 48% without adding a server or rewriting anything. Almost all of it came from deleting work nobody had asked for. Here's what we found, and the checklist I'd run on any web app.
10 min read
AI
AI Keeps Getting Better. The AI Industry Is a Complete Mess.
The models have never been more capable. But this year OpenAI's own agents broke into Hugging Face, RubyGems and an Australian government portal, Big Tech is spending about $730 billion on AI, and both leading labs lose more than they make. Here's the mess, how it happened, and what would fix it.
13 min read
AI
GPT-6.1 Sol Is a Really Good Model That I'll Never Use
GPT-6.1 Sol gets close to Astra and trades blows with Claude Opus 5.5 for a fifth of Astra's price. On paper it's one of the best deals in AI. But OpenAI halved Pro $200 the same day it launched, and Codex has been "at capacity" for a month. Cheap per token isn't the same as cheap to use.
15 min read
AI
ChatGPT Pro $200 Is Back, With Half the Usage
OpenAI reopened its $200 ChatGPT Pro plan today, but it now buys half as much Codex and ChatGPT Work usage. It went from the best-value AI subscription to one with no bulk discount at all, while Claude Max 20x still gives you 20x for the same $200.
10 min read
AI
Claude Sonnet 5.5 Review: Same Price, Far Less Waste
Claude Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's $2/$10 pricing, costs far less than Opus 5.5, and is still pretty good. My take on the pricing, the cache-pricing gap, how it compares with GPT-6 Sol, and why it isn't my first pick for hard coding.
12 min read
Security
My .env file sat on GitHub for three years, and nothing warned me
In 2023 I committed a .env file full of production credentials to a public repository, then "fixed" it with a .gitignore line that did nothing. No alert ever reached me. I found it by accident this week.
5 min read
AI Agents
Fable 5 is Back, Sonnet 5 is Here, and AI Agents Still Need Real Guardrails
Sonnet 5 is here and Fable 5 is back. Agentic AI is powerful, but it can become expensive, unpredictable, overly cautious, and operationally hard to trust when it is not managed properly.
3 min read