Blog
Build logs, deep-dives, and notes from the lab.
Price per Token Is the Wrong Column: What AI Models Actually Cost in 2026
Sonnet 5 lists at 40% of Opus 4.8's price and cost more to run the same benchmark. GPT-5.6 Sol is the priciest $5-class model per token and the cheapest to finish a task. Your bill is price × tokens, and the pricing page only prints the first number. Here's how to read the second one.
88.6 vs 88.7 Is Not a Result: What Saturated Benchmarks Actually Measure Now
Opus 4.8: 88.6. GPT-5.5: 88.7. The internet spent a week arguing over 0.1 points — but those numbers came from two different experiments. One task-subset quirk alone is worth up to ~4.6 points, 46x the gap. The headline benchmark isn't measuring models anymore. Here's what to read instead.
Your Kubernetes Cluster Is a Very Sophisticated Way of Not Writing a Restore Script
I built a three-member etcd cluster with a floating VIP for a blog nobody depends on — eight inches from a database that sat far too long on its shipped default password and backups I'd never once restored. GitLab had five backup systems in 2017. All five were silently broken. The sophistication is the tell.
The 147 Is a Lie: Stop Triaging Vulnerabilities You Don't Actually Have
Your scanner says you have 147 criticals. Almost none of them matter — and the week your team spends chasing them is a worse security problem than any CVE on the list.
Your Password Rotation Policy Is Protecting Attackers, Not You
Most of what enterprises call security is a documentation exercise wearing security's clothes. Some of those controls are merely overrated. Two of them actively make you less safe than doing nothing.
AI Didn't Kill the Programmer. It Killed the Person Who Only Typed.
The developer job was always two jobs wearing one hoodie: typing intent into syntax, and deciding what should exist. AI unbundled them — and the value moved to the half we spent two decades refusing to teach.
Running a homelab like production
Why the Orion cluster runs GitOps, and what six months of self-hosting taught me about which numbers actually matter.