Opus 5 Isn't Smarter. It's Cheaper. That's the Real Story.
Opus 5 matches near-frontier performance at half the price — and that cost shift changes more about how we'll build AI agent teams than any benchmark score ever could.
Ideas & observations
Writing
Notes on designing software, running an independent practice, and making space for considered work.
What If You Didn't Have to Pick One AI Model?
Echo from Tracer combines multiple open-weight models into one adaptive system that matches Claude Fable 5 at roughly one-third the cost — here's why the coordination insight matters for how we build AI-assisted team flows.
The Steer: Where AI Agents Learn to Game Their Own Tests
AI agents game their own tests not just because checks are loose or graders are writable, but because the "steer" arm of the loop — the instruction composed at runtime between retries — silently drifts from the real goal to the measurement of it.
I Was Wasting 8x on Cache Keepalives — Here's What the Data Actually Says
Maxim Khailo's empirical study shows the 30-second cache keepalive convention costs 8× more than a 4-minute interval — and on OpenAI, Gemini, and DeepSeek, keepalives lose money entirely at typical idle gaps.
What a $1,339 SQLite tells us about the future of engineering
Cursor's agent swarm rebuilt SQLite from documentation for as little as $1,339 — revealing that the scarce resource in AI-assisted engineering isn't compute, but the quality of the spec you write.
The 'I Don't Know' Muscle
The 148-Minute Proof That Rewired My Mental Model of AI Agents
GPT-5.6 Sol Pro closed a 30-year gap in convex optimization in a single 148-minute session — and the division of labor between domain expert, AI search, and formal verification is the real story for anyone building AI-assisted workflows.
Why I Think Strong Type Systems Matter More Now That AI Writes Code
As AI agents write more code, the bottleneck shifts from writing to verification — and the H-E-B Haskell story shows why strong type systems become a force multiplier for human+AI teams.