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Martin Alderson

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Web development, AI tooling, and building better software

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Martin Alderson
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Have the frontier labs mixed up AI safety and security?

The recent agent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic look less like a technical failure and more like a philosophical one - treating security controls as though they only need to work most of the time.

Martin Alderson
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Reducing codebase cognitive debt through... quizzes?

A simple technique for keeping up with a codebase that coding agents are changing faster than you can read: ask the agent to quiz you on it.

Martin Alderson
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What GLM-5.3 Flash running on Chinese hardware actually means

Z.AI ran a full model release on domestically manufactured Chinese chips. Impressive, but EUV lithography is a hard wall and the gap with Western inference hardware is more likely to widen than close.

Martin Alderson
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The summer of open weights

Winter 2025 was the tipping point for coding agents. Summer 2026 is shaping up to be the same for open weights - and compute supply, not model quality, is now setting the price.

Martin Alderson
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How I think about reducing AI costs

A practical framework for reducing AI costs - auditing token spend, killing legacy models, moving workloads to open weights providers, and fixing the agent and tool inefficiencies that quietly burn tokens.

Martin Alderson
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Watch out for cache read costs

For long agentic sessions cache reads are most of the bill, not input or output tokens. KV caches have shrunk dramatically while cache read pricing has barely moved.

Martin Alderson
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I'm (mostly) picking models on speed now, not intelligence

For the first time I'm choosing my daily driver models on tokens per second rather than raw intelligence. Why ~100tok/s might be the new 100ms, where the speed gains stop mattering, and the price war that's coming.

Martin Alderson
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

Martin Alderson
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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

Martin Alderson
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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.

Martin Alderson
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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.

Martin Alderson
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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.