Antal István

TECHNICAL INSIGHTS & SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES

A curated collection of thoughts, guides, and recommendations on modern software development, architecture patterns, and engineering best practices.

LATEST POSTS

Recently published
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Thoughts/Jun 13, 2026

Benchmarks are a suggestion

Model benchmark tables and one-shot demos are vendor-run, Goodharted, and blind to the harness you actually ship through. The only benchmark with predictive power for your work is your work.

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Guides/May 11, 2026

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.

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Guides/May 11, 2026

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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Guides/Apr 26, 2026

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.

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Guides/Mar 7, 2026

Spec Driven Development

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

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Guides/Feb 21, 2026

Agent Skills

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

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Guides/Feb 15, 2026

Agentic Coding Survival Guide

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

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Thoughts/Dec 10, 2025

Developing with Confidence

On using linters, type checkers, automated tests, and CI pipelines to build software with confidence instead of anxiety.

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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