Spikefu: Software, with footnotes

Newsletters Blog About
Follow Spike on Bluesky Follow Spike on X Twitter (rarely used) Go to Spike's GitHub page
  • May 17, 2026 · 9:21 AM

    The Local Turn: Frontier Models on Laptops, $30K Surprise Invoices, and Why the Harness Doesn't Matter

    A 284-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model running on a 96GB MacBook. A 26-million-parameter function-caller that fits on a watch. A $30,141.33 Bedrock…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • May 9, 2026 · 8:33 AM

    Velocity vs. Verification: The Agent Stack Audits Itself

    An accidental source-map leak exposed a 3,167-line god-function at the world's leading LLM company. A trust dialog became a one-click RCE in four major coding…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • May 6, 2026 · 5:58 PM

    The Residue Is Cheap: Agents, Harnesses, and the New Bottlenecks

    Three storylines are converging into one. Coding agents have crossed a reliability threshold where practitioners no longer review every line they ship. The…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • May 4, 2026 · 6:29 PM

    Velvet Ropes, Curated Tokens, and the Burry Trade

    The 2026 AI story is splitting along three seams: frontier models are getting smaller and more gated at the same time, the developer substrate is consolidating…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 29, 2026 · 12:15 PM

    Skills as Recruiters: Agents, Wallets, and the New Supply-Chain Layer

    The supply-chain attack just moved up a layer. Instead of slipping malicious code into npm or PyPI, a single ClawHub author has shipped 30 perfectly clean…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 28, 2026 · 4:55 PM

    The Pantheon Pattern: Multi-Agent Coding, Cheap Models, and the Mac Studio Ceiling

    Agentic coding has stopped being a demo and started becoming an architectural choice — one with a price tag, a hardware footprint, and a vocabulary problem. The…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 22, 2026 · 3:36 PM

    Desks, Harnesses, and Rate Limits: The Local-AI Rebalancing

    A quietly coherent story is emerging across the AI stack: inference is migrating from rented GPUs to the desk, coding agents are shrinking their harnesses…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 21, 2026 · 6:25 PM

    Fences, Agents, and the Edge: Guardrails for AI-Built Software

    This week's through-line: the gap between what AI coding agents can do and what you should actually let them do — and the operational discipline that sits underneath either answer. We start with a…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 21, 2026 · 6:04 PM

    The Architecture of Reliable Agents: Harnessing, Local Inference, and Open-Source Control

    Agents are rapidly moving beyond single-prompt interactions into multi-day, multi-session workflows. But as context windows remain discrete, bridging the gap…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
  • Apr 21, 2026

    Harnessing the Agent: From 200-Feature JSONs to 8GB VRAM Qwen3.6

    The common thread across this week's reading: the model is increasingly the easy part. Whether you're running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on a gaming GPU, fine-tuning it with Unsloth, or turning Claude Opus 4.5…

    Read · Download PDF · Listen
© 2026 Stephen (Spike) Milligan. All rights reserved.
Follow Spike on Bluesky Follow Spike on X Twitter (rarely used) Spike's GitHub page