A room full of CTOs and architects met in a Swiss village this summer and, without quite meaning to, gave a name to the thing I’ve been quietly building for months. They call it harness engineering. I’ve been calling it “the tooling is the new model.” Same animal. And the part they flagged as unsolved, I think I’ve got a first, opinionated stab at.
Two and a half years into my whale song project I’ve killed one platform, walked away from a $13K dev kit, gotten my ham license, and pivoted to (water-borne) drones. I can do that link myself across the Bay of Banderas with a radio I’m now legally allowed to key up. Read on.
My experience is that Claude Code is great with Foundation Models, but way too heavy for local inference. I’ve been enjoying oh-my-pi (omp) but was surprised that hax (a simpler agent in written in C) was TWICE as fast and used HALF the tokens! It’s all about PREFILL1. Read on!
I’ve written before about what a BrightSign extension actually is and about why edge AI has to run locally on signage. This post is the “show, don’t tell” follow-up. If you want to see what all that theory looks like as a running, watchable thing, there’s exactly one place to start: Argus.
XDA ran a piece that stopped me mid-scroll: a 27B open-weights model reverse-engineered a commercial application’s license check — recovered a deliberately obscured crypto key out of ARM64 assembly, caught and corrected its own mistake without being told, and produced a working bypass PoC. In about thirty minutes. On a desktop box. I have (a version of) that box. So I went and set it up.
I use more than one coding agent. Not because I’m indecisive — because I’m testing different agents - and learning how they work - and the field is moving fast. Seems like a new one every week! But every single one of them wants skills in its own directory, and I got tired of cp -r and stale copies. So I wrote a tool.
You can’t lead From hehind anymore. For twenty years the path to Engineering leadership had a well-worn groove: write code for a few years, get “promoted out of” writing code, spend the rest of your career managing budgets, headcount, and status reports. The further up you went the less technical you were expected to be, and nobody blinked. That era is over. Not ending. Over.
I left Twitter before it became X. Not in some grand, principled exit — no manifesto post, no “see you on Mastodon” farewell thread. I just quietly stopped opening the app one day, and never really went back. By the time Elon Musk’s name was on the masthead, I was already gone. So when people ask if I miss “old Twitter,” I have to clarify: I don’t miss what it became right before the sale. I miss what it was years before that — a smaller, weirder, more sincere place.
I have two 128 GB unified-memory machines on my desk. Day job gear, not mine. One is an ASUS Ascent GX10 — an NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell appliance half the size of a hardback book. The other is an HP ZBook Ultra G1a, a 14" mobile workstation running AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 (“Strix Halo”). Both hold an 80B coding model entirely in memory. How do they compare for agentic coding?
Right now, as an industry, we are running almost entirely on COGS and calling it innovation. Kelsey Hightower gave a talk at PlatformCon called Zero Token Architecture, and the whole thing compresses down to one sentence: infer once, export, run without inference. He’s right. I want to give you the vocabulary that makes it land in a budget meeting, because I work at a company that ships hardware, and we already have words for this.