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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.

Latest

8 posts
Thoughts

Testing and static analysis

In mathematics nothing is real until you prove it; in code the proof is tests. With an agent writing the code we need more testing and static analysis, not less — and tests good enough to be worth reading.

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.

Guide

The agent loop that ships while you are away

An opinionated set of agent skills (and the Artifex CLI they lean on) that ships work from a Jira ticket to a deployed fix without you at the keyboard.

Guide

Spec Driven Development

A practical guide to turning plans into durable specs that humans and agents can review, approve, and implement.

Guide

Agent Skills

On skills as the missing layer in agentic coding — encoding tribal knowledge, composing with commands, and keeping the context window focused.

Guide

Agentic Coding Survival Guide

A practical guide to agentic coding — context windows, tools, modes, prompting, system prompts, skills, spec-driven development, and warnings.

Thoughts

Perspectives on software development, tech stacks, and engineering philosophy

Guides

Practical tutorials and how-to articles for real-world development challenges

Recommendations

Curated resources, tools, and content worth exploring