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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

AI model benchmarks are a suggestion

Thoughts

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.

PDF to Markdown on a Mac

Guide

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

Video transcripts on a Mac

Guide

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.

The agent loop that ships while you are away

Guide

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.

Spec Driven Development

Guide

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

Agent Skills

Guide

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

Agentic Coding Survival Guide

Guide

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

Developing with Confidence

Thoughts

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

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