Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Pierce Allen 
I’ve been watching the reactions to Anthropic’s watermark announcement for the past few days, and honestly? Most of the hot takes are missing the point. The short version is this: Starting August 2, 2026, all new Claude models will embed machine-detectable watermarks in generated text. Images and SVGs get C2PA metadata signatures too. It applies … Read more
The short version: DeepSeek open-sourced their Agent harness, the scaffolding that turns a raw model into something that actually works in the real world. And they did it in a way that openly admits what everyone in the industry has been quietly realizing: the model itself isn’t the whole story anymore. Honestly? I spent the … Read more
I’ll be honest: my Windows 11 PC was taking forever to start up. Like, go grab a coffee and maybe come back forever. It wasn’t always like this. When I first upgraded, it felt snappy. But over time, things got sluggish. I’d press the power button, walk away, do a small chore, and still wait. … Read more
Apple’s September event is coming, and this year’s lineup sounds different than usual. Based on what’s been floating around, we might see five new devices. But here’s the kicker – Apple might not show the full iPhone 18 family all at once. The standard iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and the second-gen iPhone Air? Those could … Read more
Google dropped Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13. That’s three weeks after 3.6 Flash came out. Three weeks. I had to double-check that date the first time I saw it. Here’s what actually matters: it’s better at coding, better with AI agents, and it costs half of what 3.6 Flash originally cost. That last part … Read more
Microsoft started rolling out the unified Copilot app yesterday, August 14. If you’re using Copilot right now—either the consumer version or the Microsoft 365 one—things are about to look different. Not different in a huge way, though. Let me explain. The wider hype around AI coding has cooled off anyway. Vibe coding getting boring is … Read more
I’ll be honest: I had high hopes for DeepSeek Harness. When I heard DeepSeek was releasing their first Agent product, I pictured something like Codex or Workbuddy. Maybe a polished desktop app. Or at least a Claude Code-style CLI tool that you could fire up and start using right away. I thought the whole point … Read more
DeepSeek dropped something new just yesterday, August 13. Not a model this time, but an agent harness called DeepSeek Harness. They open-sourced it under MIT and put it up on GitHub (https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness). I spun it up last night and spent a few hours with it. Here’s what I found. Wait, I should back up. What’s … Read more
Honestly? I didn’t see this coming. DeepSeek has been killing it on the model side for a while now. Cheap API, solid performance, open weights. They’ve been the budget champ for developers who don’t want to burn cash on OpenAI or Claude. But yesterday they dropped something different. Not a model. Not a price cut. … Read more
I’ve been using AI coding assistants for a while now. Not because I can’t write code without them — I can. But because they save me time. And time is the one thing I never have enough of. I started with Cursor. Then I tried Trae. Then Claude Code showed up and everyone lost their … Read more