A few months ago I wrote about “good enough” models, arguing that cheap models had gotten smart enough for most coding work, and that the expensive frontier models were best saved for the tasks that actually need them. That’s mostly played out as expected. Which leaves a new question: once you’re sure you don’t need the smartest model for a task, how do you find the cheapest one that’s still smart enough?

You often hear that Chinese models are censored, and the go-to example is that they won’t talk about Tiananmen Square. I had a feeling that wasn’t the whole story, so I tested it.

Tailcat came out a few weeks ago and made quite the splash. This is so far up my alley it’s hard to describe, I’d even previously built tunnelworm, which is the same basic idea as tailcat but built on top of magic wormhole, so I was excited to use this cleaner and more featureful version without having to maintain anything myself. There was just one problem: for some reason tailcat’s CI pipeline is not configured to build macOS versions of the binary, instead asking users to install it via homebrew. Homebrew is great, but I prefer simpler solutions when possible, and since tailcat is a Go program, cross-platform compilation is straightforward.

I save a pretty unreasonable number of links.

Most of them come from Twitter or HN, but sometimes an Instagram post or (on an off day) a LinkedIn post will sneak in. I’ll be scrolling around when I see a post that looks interesting, realize I don’t have time to give it the attention it deserves right now, and toss it into whatever read-it-later app I’m using. Then I keep scrolling, happy in the knowledge that I have successfully prevented this particular nugget of internet wisdom from disappearing forever.

A lot of coding wisdom gets passed from one generation of engineers to the next as a kind of meme: highly distilled, compressed lessons learned. Don’t rewrite the codebase. DRY. YAGNI. Optimize for readability. Respect complexity you don’t understand. These are useful shorthands that encode real, hard-won experience into a form that’s easy to remember and easy to pass along. Except that the ground has shifted under us, and because the knowledge is so highly compressed into these acronyms and concepts it’s difficult to tell which parts still apply. Like any good meme they’re optimized for transmission, not for accuracy, and nobody stamped an expiry date on them.

(Part 1 of ?)

I woke up, grabbed some coffee, and (as one does as a 2026 dev) took a look at what my agents had gotten up to overnight. Forty-odd tickets closed, an excessive amount of green checks, followed by a tidy summary of everything that had been accomplished. I could feel my spirits rising, it looked like a solid week’s worth of work, all done automatically for me overnight!