Maxim Saplin articles - 82 total
Ran out of Cursor tokens and switched to GitHub Copilot: Side-by-Side
DISCLAIMER! The best AI coding tool is the one available to you, that gives you the best model and...
Long-horizon agents: OpenCode + GPT-5.2 Codex Experiment
Sequoia Capital has recently published a blog post arguing that AGI has been achieved because...
Cursor-like Semantic Rules in GitHub Copilot
Both GitHub Copilot and Cursor offer ways to define guardrails for agents in the form of Instructions...
AI Dev: Plan Mode vs. SDD — A Weekend Experiment
Three months ago, I tested Kiro's Spec-Driven Development (SDD) workflow and walked away impressed...
AI Dev: Testing Kiro
Kiro is a yet another VSCode fork (just like Cursor or Windsurf) that integrates AI coding features....
LLMs are Bad at Math
LLMs are known to struggle with math. Not in those PhD level tasks from AIME eval, where the...
Grok 3 API - Reasoning Tokens are Counted Differently
I've learned it the hard way... If you use the recently released Grok-3 Mini reasoning model (which...
XYZ% of Code is Now Written by AI... Who Cares?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that "as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by...
GPT 4.1, o3, o4-mini - OpenAI releases through the lens of LLM_Chess
This will be a quick post. I've ran the recent OpenAI models through LLM Chess eval: o4-mini and o3...
Mercury Coder - A Quick Test of Diffusion Language Model
I have recently touched on how diffusion/transformer models come into new domains - specifically the...
Llama 4 - 10M Context? Coding? Decent Follow-up?
Meta has brought the long-awaited Llama 4 models on Saturday, April 5. Llama 3 came out on April 26,...
4o Image Gen - Diffusion/Transformer Cross-over Trend?
In March we saw 2 major releases of image generation tools ((Google, OpenAI)) that are very much...
SGLang vs llama.cpp - A Quick Speed Test
Recently, I stumbled upon a post about SGLang, an open-source LLM inference engine that boasts 2-5x...
OpenAI o3-mini Tested in LLM Chess
OpenAI has recently presented its newest reasoning model - o3-mini. At Medium and High reasoning...
Qwen2.5 Max Release Went Unnoticed in Deepseek Hysteria
Last week, Chinese Big-Tech company Alibaba released its best model to date: Qwen-Max. It is a...
DeepSeek-V3: Laziness vs Eagerness
In late 2023, people complained about GPT-4 Turbo's laziness - often the model didn't complete tasks....
Deepseek R1 vs OpenAI o1
Deepseek R1 is out - available via Deepseek API or free Deepseek chat. If you are following LLM/Gen...
OpenAI o1/o3 - Be Careful What you Wish For...
Hallucination is also a latent fear accompanying the copy-pasting of a long scroll of text from a...
OpenAI o3 - Thinking Fast and Slow
OpenAI has teased the o3 model today—a further development of the "reasoning" model and a successor...
Tried Phi-4, It didn't Impress
Phi-4 14B has been recently released. Benchmarks look promising, e.g. it beats GPT-4o in Math: I...
Gemini 2.0 Released, Reminding of "AI Hitting the Wall" Talks
Today Google has presented a major update to its flagship SOTA model - Gemini 2.0. What caught my...
The Power of Pragmatism: Engineering Cultures and China's Ascendancy
A company decided to rename its product XYZ to ABC. Assets, texts in the app, and web pages were...
Can LLMs Play Chess? I've Tested 13 Models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5 etc.)
UPD September 15, 2025: Reasoning models opened a new chapter in Chess performance, the most recent...
Microsoft Autogen Has Split in 2... Wait 3... No, 4 Parts
One of the most popular open-source frameworks of 2023, which explored the application of AI agents...
Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B - Quirks and Features
The new open model by NVidia, Nemotron 70B has recently been the hotspot of "this is wild", "this is...
DDR5 Speed, CPU and LLM Inference
This is the 3rd part of my investigations of local LLM inference speed. Here're the 1st and 2nd...
Gen AI Hype - the Never Ending Excitement
"When sensationalism wins over nuance, we lose our ability to think." is a great quote by Lex Fridman...
OpenAI o1 Release is so Reminiscent of Apple Events - it's an Incremental Update
Yesterday OpenAI introduced "A new series of reasoning models for solving hard problems", which...
Continue.dev: The Swiss Army Knife That Sometimes Fails to Cut
First Impressions I had low expectations from Continue.dev when I first installed it in...
Python 3.13 RC1 - a Quick CPU Benchmark
Python 3.13 is due to be released in October, yet the first release candidate was published earlier...