When I first started programming, I thought the best developers had one superpower. They remembered everything. Every function. Every method. Every API. Every piece of syntax. So I spent hours trying to memorize things. JavaScript methods. SQL queries. Regex. CSS properties. I thought that would make me valuable. I was wrong. The Day Everything Changed One day I watched a senior developer solve a difficult production issue. They opened Google. They opened the documentation. They searched Stack Overflow. They experimented. They tested. They failed. Then they fixed it. That's when I realized something. They weren't valuable because they remembered everything. They were valuable because they knew how to solve problems. Google Doesn't Make You Less of a Developer For a long time I felt guilty every time I searched for something. "Real developers shouldn't need Google." That's what I believed. Then I realized... Even experienced engineers search for documentation every day. Not because they're bad. Because technology changes constantly. Nobody remembers every detail. Syntax Is Temporary Think about the last five years. How many frameworks have changed? How many libraries disappeared? How many APIs were deprecated? Technology moves fast. Problem-solving doesn't. If you know how to think... You can learn any syntax. Companies Don't Hire Human Compilers Nobody pays you because you know where to put a semicolon. Nobody promotes you because you memorized every React hook. Companies pay developers who can: understand problems communicate clearly debug effectively make good decisions work with people deliver reliable software Those skills don't disappear when a framework becomes outdated. The Questions That Matter Instead of asking: "Do I know this syntax?" I started asking: Can I understand the problem? Can I break it into smaller pieces? Can I explain my thinking? Can I find reliable information quickly? Can I learn something new when I need it? Those questions changed the wa

Cost is everything. In just about every agentic conversation, the three things that come up for enterprises implementing AI workloads are: Cost Observability Security and as AI continues to throw everyone for a loop when it comes to cost management (e.g - Uber running out of the yearly token budget in one quarter), the ability to shrink resource (like hardware) usage will be crucial moving forward. In this blog post, you will learn how to cust costs by 90% using Agent Susbtrate in comparison to Agents running in k8s Deployments/Pods. The Cost Comparison Agents need a place to run. The "place to run" needs to be a platform that's easily managed, orchestrated, and has the ability to cluster resources. Resources like CPU, GPU, and memory need to be able to scale and expand. Without this, it's a matter of manually managing servers that Agents are running on and clients to interact with said server. That's why so many organizations choose Kubernetes to run Agentic. When running Agents per Pod, however, that can get costly very quick in terms of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory) and performance (can your cluster scale up and down quickly based on resource needs when it comes to Agents coming up and going down per use?). The tests in this blog post show: Always-on Agents running in k8s. Actors running in Workers via Agent Substrate And the comparison will be 50 always-on Pods in comparison to 50 Actors across 5-7 Workers (Pods). If there are 50 Agents running per Pod and 50 Agents running per Worker with 5-10 Actors per Pod, you can already imagine the hardware resource savings that can be accomplished. Right now, the majority of organizations start off with the "one Agent per Pod" approach as that's the fastest way to show value and get up and running. For the future, however, Agents in Actors via Agent Substrate will be how organizations deploy when they care about efficiency, optimization, and managing cost. Let's dive in from a hands-on perspective. Prerequisites To follow a

I connected one client to a blocking TCP server and held the socket open without sending a single byte. Then I connected a second client and sent it a line of text. The second client sat there for 1.51 seconds with no reply. It got its echo back one millisecond after I closed the first connection. That 1.51 seconds is the reason the other six versions of this server exist. Last week I wrote up why I rebuilt this server seven times : framework knowledge resets every few years, the layer underneath it compounds. That piece stayed at the level of outcomes. This one goes the other way, down into the code and the numbers. The claims that matter here are the kind you can read a hundred times without being able to derive them. "select is O(n)." "epoll only hands you the ready fds." I had read both for years. I wanted to make my own machine say them out loud. The target the whole exercise is built around is Dan Kegel's old C10K problem : how do you serve ten thousand clients at once on one server? Each of the seven versions hits a wall, and the wall is what names the next one. The whole thing is one echo server written seven times, no libraries beyond libc, on GitHub . Every number below is from running it on macOS (Apple clang 21, darwin 25.4) on 2026-06-29. The binaries are built with AddressSanitizer and UBSan on, so read the absolute microseconds loosely. The structure is what holds. Phase 01: blocking, and the 1.5 second stall The first server is the one everybody writes first. Accept a connection, talk to it, close it, accept the next. for (;;) { int client_fd = accept ( server_fd , NULL , NULL ); if ( client_fd == - 1 ) { perror ( "accept" ); continue ; } handle_client ( client_fd ); close ( client_fd ); } handle_client loops on read until the client hangs up. Both accept and read block: when there is nothing to do, the thread sleeps in the kernel. That is good for idle cost and fatal for everything else. While the server is parked in read waiting on client A, client

SokoFlow Build Log — Month 1 of 4 Last semester I set out on a new strategic plan to level up my software development skills through deliberate, project-based learning. That work produced one of the most ambitious things I've built so far: Sim-Pesa , a local-first transactional appliance that lets developers working in the M-Pesa ecosystem test and simulate STK Push workflows entirely on their own machines, without depending on the Daraja sandbox. I documented that build in 16 weekly posts, which you can find here . This semester, the focus shifts — from fintech foundations to cloud-native integration and real-world systems. The flagship project is SokoFlow , a conversational ERP for small Kenyan shopkeepers to track inventory and record sales entirely through WhatsApp chat. No app to download, no training session required — just natural language. Where Sim-Pesa lived in a controlled, predictable transactional world, SokoFlow steps into the mess of cloud-native reality: third-party API failures, webhook signature verification, the statelessness of HTTP, and container orchestration. The target audience shifts too — Kenyan SMEs operating on infrastructure that is often unreliable by design, not by exception. It's an ambitious project, but the goal was always to learn as much as possible from it. With the plan in place, I got to work. 1. The Vision of a Headless ERP The first real question I had to answer before writing a line of code: what does "headless" actually mean? Headless architecture decouples the frontend — the "head," or user interface — from the backend, the "body" that holds the data and business logic. A conventional ERP bundles both: backend plus a dashboard or UI on top. A headless ERP, by contrast, is just the engine. The brain. There's no built-in screen. So how do users interact with a system that has no interface of its own? SokoFlow doesn't actually care. It could be: WhatsApp SMS A web app A mobile app A voice assistant In this case, the "frontend

June 2026 is shaping up to be the month open models stopped playing catch-up. Three major releases in as many weeks have shifted the landscape, and none of them involve the usual frontier-lab drama. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: 550B Parameters, Zero Restrictions On June 4, NVIDIA quietly dropped Nemotron 3 Ultra — a 550-billion-parameter behemoth under a fully permissive open license. That's not "open-weight with strings attached" — it's the most capable model you can download, modify, and deploy commercially without asking permission. Early benchmarks show it competitive with GPT-4.5-class models on code generation and reasoning tasks, while significantly outperforming Llama 4 on mathematical reasoning. If you have the hardware (think 8×H100 nodes minimum), this is the new default for self-hosted enterprise AI. GLM-5.2: China's Answer, MIT License Z.AI launched GLM-5.2 on June 13, and it arrived with full MIT-licensed weights within the week. What makes this noteworthy isn't just the permissive license — it's that GLM-5.2 punches well above its weight class on long-context retrieval and multilingual benchmarks. Developers running locally can deploy it on consumer-grade hardware with quantization, making it a strong contender for privacy-sensitive applications. The API tier starts at ~$18/month, but the real value is in the self-hosted path. Gemini 3.5 Flash Gets Computer Use Google DeepMind also shipped computer use capabilities in Gemini 3.5 Flash this month. Think Claude's computer-use agent paradigm, but running on the fastest Flash-tier model Google offers. Early demos show agents completing multi-step browser tasks — form filling, data extraction, web scraping — at significantly lower latency than competing solutions. The throughline is clear: open models are no longer a compromise . Whether you need 550B monsters for reasoning, MIT-licensed alternatives for compliance, or fast agents for automation, June 2026 delivered on all fronts.

You've got a folder of a few hundred screenshots and you want the text out of each one. Or you want to generate a batch of images for a side project. Or you just want to drop a single "summarize this" call into a script you're writing on a Sunday afternoon. So you open the pricing page for the official API, do the math on per-token billing plus setting up keys and a payment method, and it's hard to justify, because the exact same model will do the exact same thing for free in a browser tab. There are really two ways to get a model like ChatGPT or Gemini to do work for you. The web UI is free, or already covered by a subscription you're paying for anyway, but you drive it by hand. The API is scriptable, but you pay by the token. Most of the time that trade-off is fine. But for a whole category of work like hobby projects, throwaway scripts, research, or anything that doesn't need production-grade reliability, you're stuck picking between "free but manual" and "automated but paid." Which raises the obvious question: why not automate the free web UI? It's just a webpage. You open it, type in the box, click send. It turns out that hides a few fiddly problems, which I ran into enough times that I eventually built a small library for them. In this article we'll work through what it takes to automate these UIs, and at the end I'll show how little code it comes down to. 1. What it takes to drive a chat UI A single round trip with ChatGPT or Gemini breaks down into four jobs: Get your text into the input box Optionally attach a file Wait for the model to finish answering And read the answer back out. Every one of these is harder than it sounds, because the page is a modern single-page app that was never built to be driven by a script. We'll use Selenium with undetected-chromedriver, and for now assume the browser is already open (we'll get to launching it in the next section). To keep the code readable I'll show whichever of the two platforms makes each problem clearest, and

Follow here Thrashing occurs when a system spends more time swapping data between memory and disk than actually performing useful work. In simple terms, the system becomes busy “managing memory” instead of processing tasks efficiently. A simple real-life analogy is a small study table with space for only three books while you need ten books to study. You constantly remove one book and bring another from the bookshelf again and again. Instead of studying, most of your time is wasted managing the books. That situation is similar to thrashing. In operating systems, thrashing usually happens when RAM becomes full and too many processes compete for memory. The operating system uses virtual memory and page replacement techniques, but if the working sets of processes cannot fit into RAM, continuous page faults occur. As a result, pages are constantly swapped between RAM and disk, drastically reducing CPU utilization and slowing down the entire system. Thrashing can also occur in database systems and caching layers such as Redis. If the cache size is too small for the workload, the system keeps evicting old data to make space for new data, only to immediately need the old data again. For example, if a cache can hold 1000 items but users repeatedly request 2000 items in rotation, the cache continuously reloads and evicts the same entries. This repeated cache miss cycle is called cache thrashing. Consider an operating system example where four processes are running while RAM can hold only four pages. If each process requires at least two pages to execute properly, the system actually needs eight pages in total. Since only four pages fit in memory, the OS constantly swaps pages between RAM and disk. The CPU then spends most of its time waiting for memory I/O rather than executing instructions, resulting in severe performance degradation. A similar situation can happen in applications like Instagram using Redis caching. Suppose Redis can store 1000 user profiles while 3000 acti

If you've let a coding agent loose on AWS, you've watched it guess. It invents API parameters that don't exist, or hands you an S3 bucket a security review will bounce on sight. The Agent Toolkit for AWS is built to stop that. By the end of this post you'll have it running in whatever editor you use, plus a tour of what's in it and three workflows worth pointing it at. I use Kiro day to day, so I'll walk through that setup first. It also works with Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and any other agent that speaks MCP, the Model Context Protocol, which is the open standard agents use to connect to outside tools and data. I'll cover those too. What is the Agent Toolkit for AWS? The Agent Toolkit for AWS is a free, AWS-supported set of tools that gives AI coding agents secure access to AWS, current documentation they can read mid-task, and tested procedures for the work they tend to fumble. It plugs into the agent you already use rather than asking you to switch. In practice, that shows up in a few ways, all detailed in the AWS user guide . The agent stops guessing about APIs it never saw. The models behind these agents trained on data that's months or years old, so anything AWS shipped recently is missing or wrong in their heads, and the toolkit hands them current docs and references at request time. For multi-step work like least-privilege IAM or a production serverless stack, it follows a vetted skill instead of reconstructing the steps from half-memory. Every call goes through your own IAM credentials, shows up in CloudWatch, and gets logged to CloudTrail, so you can scope an agent to read-only even when your role can write. And the toolkit costs nothing on its own; you pay only for the AWS resources the agent creates. It's the successor to the MCP servers, skills, and plugins AWS shipped under AWS Labs in 2025. Two things make me reach for it over a raw MCP setup: condition keys that let a policy tell an agent apart from a human, and skills that have been evaluated end

Every WordPress developer knows the feeling. A host emails: "PHP 7.4 reaches end of life — we're moving you to 8.x." Or you finally want the performance and security of PHP 8.4. You stage it, click upgrade, and… white screen. Somewhere in the 40 plugins and 3 themes on the site, something called a function PHP removed years ago — and now the whole site is down. The frustrating part: the broken code is almost never yours. It's buried in third-party plugins and themes you didn't write and can't easily read. So how do you find out what breaks before you upgrade, instead of after? This post walks through exactly that, using an open-source tool called Pressready . Why "just test it on staging" isn't enough Staging tells you that something broke, rarely what or where — and only for the code paths you happen to exercise. A fatal in an admin screen or a checkout edge case you didn't click won't surface until a real user hits it. You need something that reads all the code statically and reports every risky symbol, whether or not that path runs during your manual test. That's a job for static analysis across the whole stack. Two kinds of "breakage": PHP and WordPress Upgrades break sites along two axes, and a good audit covers both: The PHP axis — language features that get removed (e.g. create_function() is gone in PHP 8.0, each() in 8.0) or change behaviour between versions. The WordPress axis — core APIs that WordPress deprecates or removes from one release to the next. Pressready checks both in a single pass: it runs PHPCompatibility for the PHP axis and a custom PHP_CodeSniffer sniff — driven by a generated dataset of WordPress core deprecations — for the WordPress axis. Install it (pick whatever fits your setup) No Composer in the project? Use the standalone PHAR or Docker: # Standalone PHAR — single self-contained file, just needs PHP curl -L https://github.com/itzmekhokan/pressready/releases/latest/download/pressready.phar -o pressready.phar chmod +x pressready.phar #

There's a paradox nobody wants to say out loud: the same frameworks companies pick because they're "enterprise-ready," "scalable," and "industry standard" are, for an LLM writing code, a minefield. Angular , React with its whole ecosystem, Nx with its monorepos: these are powerful tools, built by humans to coordinate teams of humans on massive codebases. And for that purpose, they're often the right choice — if your primary constraint is coordinating hundreds of engineers over a decade, the conventions and tooling of an established framework earn their keep. But there's a second actor in the room now. When the one writing the code is an AI, the very traits that make these frameworks "robust" turn into pure friction. The argument I'm making isn't "Angular and React are obsolete." It's narrower: we've historically optimized software architecture for human cognition, and LLMs introduce a different cost model that may favor simpler, more deterministic architectures — at least in some domains. Let's break down why, in three points. 1. The Token Tax (and the Cognitive Bottleneck) An LLM doesn't "understand" code the way we do — it processes it token by token, and every token costs something: money, latency, and context window that could otherwise be spent reasoning about the actual problem. Try asking an AI to generate a simple input form in a typical Angular/Nx context. To do it "properly" it has to: create the component (separate .ts , .html , .css files) declare the @Component with all its metadata import and wire up the right modules possibly touch an NgModule or a standalone-components config navigate 4-5 folder levels inside a typical Nx structure ( apps/ , libs/ , feature-x/ , data-access/ , ui/ ...) All of this before writing a single line of actual logic. That's architectural complexity that, for a human, pays for itself over time thanks to tooling, autocomplete, and internalized conventions. For an LLM generating text sequentially, it's a tax paid on every singl

Prologue A while ago, I decided to develop a fully accessible main navigation component in React and write a series of articles documenting the steps it took to create a non-trivial accessible component. This article completes the process of creating a main navigation component that is universally accessible, both perceptually and operatively; can operate in a controlled or uncontrolled state; and is operable when displayed in a horizontal, desktop arrangement as well as in a vertical, mobile scenario. Note : This article is one of a series demonstrating building a React navigational component from scratch while considering accessibility through the process. The articles are accompanied by a GitHub repository with releases tied to one or more articles; each builds on the previous one until a fully implemented navigation component is complete. Each release and its associated tag contain fully runnable code for the article. The code discussed in this article is available in the release. and may be downloaded at release 1.0.0 . Links in the article will take you to the proper file in the tagged GitHub Repository. Because the code for this release is scattered across components, line numbers are added to make it easier to locate in the linked GitHub file. Line numbers are also provided for those who would like to follow along with a downloaded copy. While code examples are written in JavaScript for brevity, all actual code is written in Typescript and targets React 19.x, all while using vanilla CSS. Examples use Next.js v16.x, which is not required to run the navigation component. You can view the requirements for Vertical Alignment along with previous requirements. Content Links Introduction Acceptance Criteria Data Setup Keeping SubLists Open Allowing Scroll when Focus Shifts Down Arrow Key Implementation Up Arrow Key Implementation Conclusion Introduction Up until now, all keyboard handling has been implemented with the default horizontal layout in mind. When display

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one…

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The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them. In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video...

Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in agriculture, but industry leaders should be wary of investing in AI without first laying the groundwork. The use cases are promising, especially for an industry navigating volatile fertilizer costs, unpredictable weather, and margins that leave little room for error. Research shows AI-enabled predictive models can improve crop…