Weekly Tech Cocktail – Issue #10
Each week we handpick content about technology, APIs, generative models and the future of work in software engineering and information technology. Yes, by «hand» we mean a part of an actual human.
How much would it take for you to walk away from your AI provider? This week a lot of people did the math. Anthropic switched on identity verification on Claude, and the internet answered with a wave of "I'm switching to open models". It is not just grievance: Apertus shipped as an open foundation model for sovereign use, GLM-5.2 landed as the strongest open-weights text model yet, and Vicki Boykis confirmed from the trenches that running local models is good now. The moat looks shallower than it did a week ago.
Security got a sharper frame too. Prompt injection as role confusion recasts the problem as a model that stops telling instructions and data apart, which beats yet another blocklist.
And to keep the enthusiasm honest: OpenAI's losses grew nearly 8x in 2025, on more than 34 billion dollars of spending. Someone is paying for the party.
Palate cleanser: cssQuake rebuilt Quake's renderer in pure CSS. It should not run, and yet.
#tech
Meet Alice. Alice is impatient.: Marc Brooker on why your average user waits longer than your average response time. Queueing theory you can feel.
HTTP requests without curl, using Bash /dev/TCP: the kind of TIL that makes you reread your own shell. A request with nothing but Bash.
CS 6120: Advanced Compilers, self-guided: Cornell's graduate compilers course, open and timeless. Bookmark, then actually do it.
How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++: the memory-safety argument with numbers attached, for once.
#apis
RFC 10008, the new HTTP QUERY method: a body-carrying, cacheable, idempotent way to ask questions. Finally standard.
So you want to define a well-known URI: how to add a /.well-known/ entry without making a mess, by someone who would know.
There are no instances in ATProto: Dan Abramov on the data model behind Bluesky, where your identity and posts are portable instead of tied to one server. A clean look at designing a protocol for exit.
Who actually owns your ATProto identity?: the cold-water counterpoint. That portable identity still routes through one central directory you do not really control.
#genai
Eight myths on software engineering and GenAI: ACM Queue takes apart eight comfortable assumptions. Practitioner-grade, free to read.
AI demands more engineering discipline, not less: Charity Majors on why the autocomplete era raises the bar for the humans.
Building reliable agentic AI systems: a production write-up of making LLM agents dependable, on Fowler's site.
Who owns the code Claude wrote?: the authorship and copyright question, before it becomes someone's lawsuit.
#tools
Deno Desktop: native desktop apps on the Deno runtime, an alternative to Electron and Tauri. Open source.
MicroUI: a tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library in ANSI C, from the author of lite. Open source.
.gitignore isn't the only way to ignore files in Git: exclude, info/exclude, skip-worktree. The ones you forget you have.
I'm Romain, a software craftsman and musician. Every week I dig through the noise and send back the few links worth reading.