Sign up

Martin Alderson

Not verified No WebSub updates No webmention support Not yet validated

Web development, AI tooling, and building better software

Public lists
davewiner/hackerNewsStars
Fetched

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Two kinds of AI users are emerging. The gap between them is astonishing.

A bifurcation is happening in AI adoption - power users shipping products in days versus everyone else generating meeting agendas. Enterprise tool choices are accelerating the divide.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Turns out I was wrong about TDD

I used to be a TDD sceptic - too much time writing tests for features that might get deleted. Then coding agents completely changed the economics of software testing.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Why sandboxing coding agents is harder than you think

Permission systems, Docker sandboxing, and log file secrets - why current approaches to securing coding agents fall short and what we might need instead.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

The Coming AI Compute Crunch

Why DRAM shortages, not capital, will define AI infrastructure growth through 2027

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Which programming languages are most token-efficient?

Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

I ported Photoshop 1.0 to C# in 30 minutes

Using Claude Code to port 120k lines of Pascal and 68k assembly to modern C# - and what this means for cross-platform development

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Why I'm building my own CLIs for agents

MCP tools eat thousands of tokens. A simple CLI with instructions in your CLAUDE.md file uses 71 tokens and works brilliantly.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in.

Travel agents are the classic example of an industry killed by the internet. Software engineering is facing the same disruption, but the timeline is compressed.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Are we dismissing AI spend before the 6x lands?

Critics are judging models trained on last-gen hardware. There's a 6x wave of compute already allocated - and it's just starting to produce results.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Minification isn't obfuscation - Claude Code proves it

Using ASTs and AI agents to reverse engineer minified JavaScript in minutes instead of weeks

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

Software ate the world. Agents are going to eat SaaS.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Are we in a GPT-4-style leap that evals can't see?

Gemini 3 Pro's design capabilities and Opus 4.5's reduced babysitting needs represent a subtle but significant leap that traditional benchmarks completely miss.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

I Finally Found a Use for IPv6

Using IPv6 with Cloudflare to run multiple services on a single server without a reverse proxy

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

How I use Claude Code to manage sysadmin tasks

A practical approach to managing production infrastructure using git-tracked markdown files and Claude Code for small teams

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Could Excel agents unlock $1T in economic value?

Software engineers underestimate the scale of Excel usage. With agents now able to work directly in spreadsheets, we're looking at transforming how billions of dollars in business processes are managed.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Are we really repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?

Looking at actual token demand growth, infrastructure utilization, and capacity constraints - the economics don't match the 2000s playbook like people assume

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

A non-technical CFO is shipping better code than the agencies he hired

A non-technical CFO built a production operations dashboard with Claude Code that had failed with low-code tools and agencies. This shift in who can build software is going to change everything.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Tracking MCP Server Growth

I built a tracker to monitor the growth of MCP servers in the wild - turns out the ecosystem is growing faster than I expected

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Notes from MCP Dev Summit Europe: Where the Protocol Is Headed

Insights from MCP Dev Summit Europe on agentic discovery, client compatibility challenges, and the emerging field of agentic experience design

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

How I make CI/CD (much) faster and cheaper

Why GitHub Actions runners are slow and how bare metal servers can make your CI/CD 2-10x faster while costing 10x less

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Google AI Studio API has been unreliable for the past 2 weeks

Google's Gemini AI Studio API has been suffering from severe reliability issues with little transparency about the problems on their status page.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

What happens when coding agents stop feeling like dialup?

From magical to frustrating in months. Why AI coding agents feel like dial-up internet and what ultra-fast inference could unlock for developer productivity.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Solving Claude Code's API Blindness with Static Analysis Tools

How to give AI coding assistants complete visibility into APIs and third-party libraries using static analysis instead of basic text search.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Are OpenAI and Anthropic Really Losing Money on Inference?

Deconstructing the real costs of running AI inference at scale. My napkin math suggests the economics might be far more profitable than commonly claimed.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

I gave Claude Code a folder of tax documents and used it as a professional tax agent

Testing Claude Code beyond software engineering - using it as a tax agent to analyze documents and navigate complex tax scenarios in real-time.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Beyond the Hype: Real-World MCP Support Across Major AI APIs

Testing Model Context Protocol support across OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The reality of cross-platform MCP implementation in 2025.

Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson

Welcome to My Blog

Starting a blog about AI-assisted development, MCP integrations, and building production software with modern tooling like Claude Code and Cursor.