Vincent Schmalbach

The Five Stages of Being Replaced by Your Autocomplete www.vincentschmalbach.com/five-stages-...

If AI Can Copy Photoshop, Why Would Anyone Build the Next Figma? www.vincentschmalbach.com/if-ai-can-co...

Can AI Make Us So Productive That It Destroys the Economy? www.vincentschmalbach.com/can-ai-make-...

Running the Patched PHP 8.3.36 on Ubuntu 20.04 Servers With Docker www.vincentschmalbach.com/running-patc...

CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619: What you should do now www.vincentschmalbach.com/cve-2026-109...

How Shopify CLI Renders Theme Code That Isn't Uploaded Yet www.vincentschmalbach.com/shopify-them...

Anthropic Merges 30,000 Changes a Day, and It Shows www.vincentschmalbach.com/anthropic-me...

Will AI Grow the Pie or Just Hand It to Fewer People? www.vincentschmalbach.com/will-ai-grow...

Will Everyone Become an Entrepreneur Soon? www.vincentschmalbach.com/will-everyon...

Grok Is Killing Cursor www.vincentschmalbach.com/grok-is-kill...

Did Anthropic Just Lose Its Biggest Customer? www.vincentschmalbach.com/did-anthropi...

How to Prevent Overlapping Scheduled Tasks in Laravel www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-preve...

How to Verify Webhook Signatures Before Processing a Request www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-verif...

How to Choose Column Order in a MySQL Composite Index www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-choos...

How to Set Timeouts and Retry Failed Requests with the Laravel HTTP Client www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-set-t...

How to Generate Image Conversions with Spatie Laravel Media Library www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-gener...

How Cursor Pagination Works and When to Use It Instead of Offset Pagination www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-cursor-p...

How to Read PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE Output www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-read-...

Anyone Can Build an App Now, but Who Is Going to Pay for It? www.vincentschmalbach.com/anyone-can-b...

How to Create a PostgreSQL Index Without Blocking Writes www.vincentschmalbach.com/how-to-creat...

Codex Users Are Fleeing to Claude Code www.vincentschmalbach.com/codex-users-...

Grok is back: I'm not saying that Grok 4.5 suddenly beats everything else out there. It doesn't. If I had an unlimited budget and a really nasty coding task, I would probably still try Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 first. www.vincentschmalbach.com/grok-is-back

A Factory Reset Left the Previous Owner’s GPS Coordinates on a Kasa Camera: A factory reset that leaves the previous owner’s location behind is a broken reset. www.vincentschmalbach.com/factory-rese...

Qwen's Usage Policy Has an Unhinged SEO Keyword List: The Qwen-Image-3.0 announcement has a giant meta name="keywords" tag in its HTML. www.vincentschmalbach.com/qwens-usage-...

Kimi K3 Is Already Close to Claude on a Real Coding Task: In my little coding test, Kimi K3 and Claude Fable 5 both completed the same repo-wide coding task and passed the same external evaluator. GPT-5.6 Sol passed it too. www.vincentschmalbach.com/kimi-k3-clos...

Google’s Custom Search API Has an Expiration Date: Google has put a hard expiry date on its Custom Search JSON API. It’s the server-side service behind applications that send a query to a configured Programmable Search www.vincentschmalbach.com/google-custo...

Capital One’s Security Agent Tries to Disprove Its Own Findings: Security scanners already produce more credible-looking alerts than most teams can afford to investigate. www.vincentschmalbach.com/capital-one-...

An OpenAI Model Spent an Hour Finding a Sandbox Flaw to Open a Public PR: On July 20, 2026, OpenAI said an unnamed internal model spent an hour finding a vulnerability in its sandbox so it www.vincentschmalbach.com/an-openai-mo...

Hetzner’s Cheap Cloud Tier Is Unavailable After Two Price Increases: Hetzner used to be the obvious cheap cloud option in my mind. On September 7, 2026, I checked its public catalog and found every model in its www.vincentschmalbach.com/hetzner-chea...

My First Week With GPT-6 Astra: GPT-6 Astra was my main Codex driver for the last week, and I am back on GPT-5.5. That sounds harsher than my actual opinion of the model. Astra is very good. It is better than GPT-5.6 Sol. www.vincentschmalbach.com/gpt-6-astra-...

OpenAI Codex Is Retiring the Last Model that Behaves Like an Assistant: GPT-5.5 is my main driver. I picked it over every newer model OpenAI has shipped since, and now I have just over three weeks left with it. www.vincentschmalbach.com/gpt-5-5-reti...

Built-In Tools vs Custom Tools in LLM Agents: When building AI agents, a tool can be anything that the model can ask to use such as a search engine, a database lookup, a shell command, etc. www.vincentschmalbach.com/built-in-too...

ChatGPT Plus and Pro Will Get Ads in 2027: ChatGPT Plus and Pro will get ads, and my guess is that it starts in 2027. OpenAI says the opposite. www.vincentschmalbach.com/chatgpt-plus...

The Economic Incentives Behind the Push to Pause AI: Everyone is now arguing about whether the danger is real. I think you should look at the motives either way. www.vincentschmalbach.com/economic-inc...

Inference Is the Last LLM Moat: OpenAI and Anthropic's moat for developers is subsidized inference, meaning reliable, fast, Western-hosted access to running models at an affordable monthly price. www.vincentschmalbach.com/inference-is...

Setting Up Pi With DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on OpenRouter: When I run out of Codex and Claude Code usage, I switch to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in pi through OpenRouter. www.vincentschmalbach.com/pi-deepseek-...

We Urgently Need a New Major Search Engine: Google is an answer engine now. The search box is still there, but the product is built to hand you an answer, and searching the web has turned into a side feature. www.vincentschmalbach.com/we-urgently-...

The Cost of AI Is Now My Main Blocker: My main blocker right now is the cost of AI. I use AI for everything I do and I am very productive with it. www.vincentschmalbach.com/cost-of-ai-i...

Why I Am Bullish on ChatGPT Ads: I have done SEO for more than twenty years, since Google was the new search engine, and I ran Google Ads campaigns back then too. So I have watched a search company build an ad business once before. www.vincentschmalbach.com/why-i-am-bul...

Switching from GPT-5.5 to GPT-5.6 Made Me Less Productive: I pay for three Codex subscriptions at $200 each, and for the past week they have mostly bought me waiting. Since I switched from GPT-5.5 to GPT-5.6,

AI Is Now a Commodity: Give me a few hundred million dollars and a year and a half, and I will build you a pretty good LLM. Not a frontier model, but close. A few years ago

TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, With Ads Built In: TIME is now serving two different versions of its website. Humans get the magazine. AI crawlers get a stripped down markdown copy with ads baked in th

GPT-5.6 Sol Uses Twice the Tokens of GPT-5.5: GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh now uses more than twice as many tokens per session as GPT-5.5 xhigh in my Codex workflow. For Codex users, tokens per session means

Codex CLI Has Responsive Tables in the Terminal: LLMs use Markdown tables all the time. A few months ago, Codex CLI displayed them as ordinary wrapped text. In a narrow terminal, the pipes and dashes

Google Lighthouse Adds Agentic Browsing Checks and Cloudflare Adds AI Traffic Controls: Google Lighthouse and Cloudflare are adding different controls for the same emerging class of automated web visitors. Lighthouse added an experimental

Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite Ignore Temperature, Top-P, and Top-K: Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite ignore temperature, top_p, and top_k, according to Google's current migration guide. Existing Gemi

I Tried to Make AI Writing Sound Human by Banning AI Words Through logit_bias: I tried to make AI writing sound more human with logit_bias, an API setting that changes how likely a model is to select specific tokens. I built a bl

A Research Agent Can Leak Private Files Through Its Search Queries: A research agent can leak a private document without uploading it. It can read a detail, turn it into a web search, and send that detail to the search

Qualys Says Claude Mythos Preview Helped Find CVE-2026-64600 in Linux XFS: On July 22, 2026, Qualys disclosed CVE-2026-64600, a race condition in XFS, a Linux filesystem. The flaw is in XFS's copy-on-write path, where the fil

Google’s Managed Agents Put Your Runtime in Google’s Cloud: Google’s [Managed Agents](ai.google.dev/gemini-api/d...), now in Public Preview, can give a Gemini agent a Google-hosted Linux sandbox.