Practical tests of AI tools, coding agents, language models, and creative automation. Articles focus on real workflows, measurable results, costs, limitations, and what actually works in production or hobby projects.
Esoteric LLM is a useful experiment wrapped in an unusual domain: a 9-billion-parameter language model fine-tuned on 22 books about tarot, kabbalah, hermeticism, alchemy, the I Ching, astrology, and gnosticism. The full training run took about 11 hours, and the …
Esoteric LLM: Fine-Tuning a 9B Model on Tarot, Kabbalah, and Alchemy for $2 Read more »
markdown.new turns any public URL into clean Markdown by prepending one prefix: https://markdown.new/https://ravlik.com/2026/05/01/how-to-create-a-personalized-song-in-2-minutes-2. For AI coding agents, that is often more useful than a scraper, a browser automation script, or another dependency. This article explains where the trick saves context, …
The Laziest Web Reading Trick for AI Coding Agents Read more »
Alibaba’s latest flagship model Qwen 3.7 Max, released on May 21, 2026, is positioned as a purpose-built AI for the agentic era. The model supports both standard and reasoning (thinking) modes, and ranks in the top 15 across coding, math, …
Qwen 3.7 Max Costs 51% More Outside China: Alibaba’s Geographic Pricing Strategy Read more »
A new class of open-source projects is emerging in 2026: developers feed AI coding agents old game binaries, custom scripts, and decades-old documentation — and get back fully working applications. Legends of Future Past (1992), Disney Infinity (2013), FutureCop: LAPD …
The concept is simple: instead of an image or a voice message, you send someone a song written specifically for them. It sticks with people. The problem used to be that this either cost a lot (commissioning a musician) or …
In late April 2026, the OpenRouter usage stats for pi — a minimalist open-source coding agent — changed sharply and without warning. Kimi K2.6 from China’s Moonshot AI jumped to first place by token volume, overtaking Claude Opus 4.7. Here’s …
How Kimi K2.6 Took Over pi.dev: Why a Chinese Model Dethroned Claude Read more »
“Victory belongs not to the strong, but to the one who strikes first—and with precision.” – As in diplomacy: a preemptive blow can preserve an empire. Initiative is half the battle. “Every fighter must know who he is: a ninja, …