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How the AI boom might really end: 5 scenarios

With the Anthropic IPO gathering pace - and chip stocks just posting their longest losing streak since 2008 amid worries about AI debt, I thought it'd be worth writing up some of my thoughts I've put together while thinking through what may happen. By no means is this meant to be...

Shopify went back to native. I think the bigger shift is formal verification

The social media discourse is ablaze with people porting apps from slower dynamic languages to faster statically compiled languages. And we've seen both Shopify and Coinbase start switching away from React Native back to native mobile apps. What's changed, and what's next for pro...

The AI margin collapse is gathering pace

I've written a lot about the economicsofinference - especially with the advent of "good enough" open weights models. We're starting to see real price competition from all the frontier labs, even Anthropic who have been reticent to reduce prices. Let's dive into the market dynami...

Have the frontier labs mixed up AI safety and security?

The highly publicised sandbox agent escapes have certainly made news, and I wrote about the issues with sandboxing agents back in January - though I certainly didn't foresee they would escape the frontier labs. I assumed the real risk was poorly configured sandboxes for end users...

Reducing codebase cognitive debt through... quizzes?

Like many, when I'm building with coding agents, one of the "worst" problems is the codebase feels like it is often evolving faster than I can keep up with it. This cognitive debt builds up quietly - nothing is broken, but you gradually have this feeling of not being totally on t...

What GLM-5.3 Flash running on Chinese hardware actually means

Z.AI confirmed that their most recent model release was running all inference on Chinese manufactured hardware. While no doubt an impressive feat, Western companies still have a huge advantage that I can't see changing quickly.

The summer of open weights

Over the winter of 2025, after the release of Opus 4.5, coding agents grew tremendously and usage exploded. I think this summer is proving itself to be a similar tipping point for open weight models.

How I think about reducing AI costs

AI inference costs are something I've been writingaboutforawhile. It's clear that for many companies this is becoming a huge problem:

Watch out for cache read costs

I know I'm guilty of just scanning OpenRouter's pricing tables and looking at input and output costs per million token. I've realised that's the wrong number to be focused on these days and cache read costs are actually far more important.

I'm (mostly) picking models on speed now, not intelligence

For the first time I can remember, I'm not choosing my daily driver models on raw intelligence. I'm choosing them on speed.

The first known runaway AI agent - or a very bad marketing stunt?

In the past few days Hugging Face announced a security incident, which transpired to be a "runaway" agent from OpenAI.

Winners and losers in the coming AI margin collapse (part 2)

This is the second article in a two part series focusing on what I believe is perhaps the least understood upcoming shift in AI economics. If you haven't read it yet, I'd recommend starting with part one. As always, if you enjoy my writing I'd love it if you subscribe to my newsl...

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse (part 1)

This is a two part series focusing on what I believe is perhaps the least understood upcoming shift in AI economics. If you've enjoyed this, part two is now out here. And to be notified about future posts, please feel free to sign up for my newsletter.

Expert-aware quantisation: near-Q4 quality at near-Q2 size?

While researching and writing my last article on the history of KV cache compression, it occurred to me while there has been so much implemented research on KV cache efficiency, actual model weights quantisation is still pretty blunt.

A brief history of KV cache compression developments

While much is focused on the improvement of models, there's been radical improvements in the efficiency of KV cache compression. I was curious to figure out just how big the improvements are and why I think it matters so much.

xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

An unexpected development over the past few weeks is xAI's new partnerships with Anthropic and Google, providing them with a huge amount of capacity. It's worth remembering that xAI is now part of SpaceX, after the two merged back in February - so the revenue from these deals flo...

Is datacentre sovereignty really that important?

In the UK (and I'm sure elsewhere) politicians and commentators are falling over themselves to suggest that without huge fleets of datacentres built in the UK that we are going to be hopelessly left behind.

I went on the Built for Turbulence podcast

I joined Radical's "Built for Turbulence" podcast recently for a wide-ranging chat on what AI agents are doing to the economics of software. We got into whether 5 people with agents can really out-build a 500-person company, the "Figma Trap" where you end up paying your competito...

What's going on with Gemini?

Google is in a strange spot right now. They've got arguably the deepest research bench in the industry, their own custom silicon, and effectively unlimited money - and yet most developers I talk to barely touch Gemini day-to-day. The recent Google I/O announcements crystallised a...

Managed agents are the new Lambda

Managed agents (cloud-hosted agents) are the next big push from the frontier labs. They're genuinely incredible. They're also going to be the AWS Lambda of this cycle - powerful, sticky, and an absolute nightmare to migrate off once you're in deep.