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Martin Alderson

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Web development, AI tooling, and building better software

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Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

The first known runaway AI agent - or a very bad marketing stunt?

Breaking down the Hugging Face security incident caused by OpenAI's own models during a benchmark run - the sandbox escape, the package proxy, and whether it's really a marketing stunt.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Winners and losers in the coming AI margin collapse (part 2)

Part two: as AI inference margins collapse, who actually captures the value? The hardware supply chain and consumers win, model inference commoditises, and the frontier labs' escape routes are managed agents and staying ahead.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse (part 1)

GLM 5.2 is the first open weights model I'd call a genuine competitor to Opus and GPT for agentic work - at ~15-20% of the price. Part one of why AI inference margins are about to collapse.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Expert-aware quantisation: near-Q4 quality at near-Q2 size?

Profiling a MoE model to find which experts matter for a specific task, then quantising the cold ones hard. The result: near-Q4 quality at near-Q2 size for local models.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

A brief history of KV cache compression developments

How KV cache compression - from MQA and GQA to MLA and linear-attention hybrids - quietly unlocked the long context windows that make modern agentic LLMs possible.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

xAI is renting huge amounts of GPU capacity to Anthropic and Google. Financial engineering ahead of the SpaceX IPO, a real compute shortage, or a genuine datacentre advantage? Probably all three.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Is datacentre sovereignty really that important?

The UK is obsessed with building AI datacentres at home. But the arguments for sovereignty - latency, tax, control - mostly don't hold up.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

I went on the Built for Turbulence podcast

I joined Radical's Built for Turbulence podcast to talk about what AI agents are doing to the economics of software, the Figma Trap, and why running human-written code without AI audit is going to start looking reckless.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

What's going on with Gemini?

Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash was the headline model at I/O - fast, but expensive and middling at coding. Why it makes more sense as a model built for Google itself, the TPU advantage, and Google's real weakness in coding agents.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Managed agents are the new Lambda

Managed agents (cloud-hosted agent harnesses) are powerful, but locking yourself into a frontier lab's platform now is risky - here's why and what to do instead.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Open weights are quietly closing up - and that's a problem

Open weights models keep frontier labs honest on price. If they disappear, we end up with a handful of oligopolists extracting consumer surplus.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

29th August 2026: a scenario

A fictional scenario about what AI changes for cloud security, written because the technical version of the argument doesn't land with anyone except engineers.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

Figma's reliance on non-designer seats made it uniquely exposed to AI. Claude Design's launch deepens the problem.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

A little tool to visualise MoE expert routing

I built a small tool to visualise how Mixture of Experts models route tokens through different experts. It's genuinely fascinating to watch.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe?

What Anthropic's Mythos research preview tells us about the trajectory of frontier models, sandbox escapes, and the cybersecurity risk ahead.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

What next for the compute crunch?

AI compute demand is growing exponentially while supply constraints bite hard. The next 18-24 months are going to be defined by shortages, rationing and price discovery.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Telnyx, LiteLLM and Axios: the supply chain crisis

A cascading wave of supply chain attacks has hit npm and PyPI in under two weeks. LLMs are making it worse, and current mitigations aren't enough.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Using agents and Wine to move off Windows

How I used Claude Code to fix Linux desktop issues, get 'garbage'-rated Windows apps working in Wine, and what it means for software ecosystems

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Why Claude's new 1M context length is a big deal

Anthropic's 1M token context window on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 is a genuine breakthrough - and they're not even charging more for it.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

How to use the Qwen 3.5 LLMs to OCR documents

Using Qwen 3.5 open weights models to OCR scanned PDFs - locally on consumer hardware or via OpenRouter for pennies

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

The viral claim that Anthropic loses $5,000 per Claude Code subscriber doesn't survive basic scrutiny. Let's do the actual maths.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Is the AI Compute Crunch Here?

Claude Code has 2-3 million users. That's 1% of knowledge workers. The compute math gets scary from here.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Why on-device agentic AI can't keep up

On-device AI agents sound great in theory. The maths on KV cache scaling, RAM budgets, and inference speed says otherwise.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Using OpenCode in CI/CD for AI pull request reviews

Why I replaced SaaS code review tools with OpenCode running in CI/CD pipelines - cheaper, more secure, and works with any Git provider

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Which web frameworks are most token-efficient for AI agents?

I benchmarked 19 web frameworks on how efficiently an AI coding agent can build and extend the same app. Minimal frameworks cost up to 2.9x fewer tokens than full-featured ones.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Who fixes the zero-days AI finds in abandoned software?

Anthropic's red team found 500+ critical vulnerabilities with Claude. But they focused on maintained software. The scarier problem is the long tail that nobody will ever patch.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Attack of the SaaS clones

I cloned Linear's UI and core functionality using Claude Code in about 20 prompts. Here's what that means for SaaS companies.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

How to generate good looking reports with Claude Code, Cowork or Codex

A step-by-step guide to extracting your brand design system and generating on-brand PDF reports and slide decks using coding agents.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Self-improving CLAUDE.md files

A simple trick to keep your CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files updated using the agent's own chat logs - turning a tedious chore into a 30 second job.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files

Anthropic's 'legal tool' that triggered a $285bn selloff is 156KB of markdown. The panic reveals a hard truth about the future of software.