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Antal István
Software engineer

Generating code got easy. Making it last didn't.

I'm István Antal. I write about software architecture, agentic coding, and the craft of building things that last — notes from the work, not the hype.

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8 posts
Thoughts

How LLM reasoning works

You're billed for every thinking token, including the ones the vendor hides from you, and more thinking doesn't always mean a better answer.

Tool

SpecForge

A menu-bar viewer for spec driven development: one badge counts every change still in flight across all your workspaces, and a click opens the tree.

Guide

Where the specs live

Specs are easier to work with when they follow a familiar structure and you can find the changes that need your attention.

Tool

UK earnings calculator

UK take-home pay by year, month and week, plus the 62% marginal-rate corridor between £100,000 and £125,140 where a pay rise is worth least.

Thoughts

Story points were always days

Story points began as ideal days times a load factor. Teams still convert them back, velocity is that conversion in public, and throughput beats both.

Thoughts

AI model benchmarks are a suggestion

Model benchmark tables and one-shot demos are vendor-run, Goodharted, and blind to your harness. The only benchmark that predicts your work is your work.

Guide

PDF to Markdown on a Mac

Convert PDFs to clean Markdown locally on Apple Silicon with marker, so LLMs can ingest documents efficiently without rasterising every page.

Guide

Video transcripts on a Mac

Transcribe video locally on Apple Silicon with whisper.cpp at 5–8x realtime — no API key, no per-minute charges, no audio leaving the laptop.

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