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Martin Alderson

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Web development, AI tooling, and building better software

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Coming AI Compute Crunch

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Minification isn't obfuscation - Claude Code proves it

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

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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

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

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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.

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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.

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I Finally Found a Use for IPv6

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.