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Picking your first LLM in 2026 without reading 40 benchmark charts

  • LLMs

If you are new to this and trying to pick your first AI model, the internet will hand you forty benchmark charts and a headache. Ignore them. The right first model has almost nothing to do with leaderboard trivia and almost everything to do with what you are actually going to do. Here is the short, honest version.

Read more: Picking your first LLM in 2026 without reading 40 benchmark charts

Setting up a private, local AI stack for people who value their data

  • Local AI
  • Ethics

If your work involves anything sensitive, client data, health records, unreleased products, legal material, the idea of piping it through someone else API should make you at least a little uncomfortable. The good news is that in 2026 you do not have to. A genuinely capable, fully private AI stack is now within reach for a normal team. Here is how to think about building one.

Read more: Setting up a private, local AI stack for people who value their data

How to read an AI benchmark like a skeptic

  • LLMs
  • Benchmarks

Every model launch comes with a chart where the new model is tallest. The charts are technically true and practically useless, because they are marketing wearing a lab coat. Here is how to read a benchmark like a skeptic, so a leaderboard never again talks you into the wrong model for your actual work.

Read more: How to read an AI benchmark like a skeptic

A practical workflow for coding with AI without shipping its mistakes

  • LLMs
  • Coding

AI coding tools are genuinely great and genuinely dangerous, often in the same suggestion. They will write in thirty seconds something that would have taken you twenty minutes, and it will contain a subtle bug you would never have written yourself. Here is the workflow I actually use to get the speed without shipping the mistakes.

Read more: A practical workflow for coding with AI without shipping its mistakes

Getting AI to write in your voice instead of its own

  • LLMs
  • Prompting

Every model has a default voice, and it is the same voice: smooth, agreeable, faintly corporate, allergic to a strong opinion. It is the tone of a brand apologizing. If you want AI to help you write without sounding like everyone else who uses AI, you have to actively drag it away from that default. Here is how.

Read more: Getting AI to write in your voice instead of its own

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Latest from the blog

  • The case against the chatbot as a universal interface
  • 'It works on my prompt' is the new 'it works on my machine'
  • Speech-to-text in practice: what works and what still does not
  • Building your own eval when benchmarks do not fit your task
  • What we lose when we stop struggling with hard problems
  • Guardrails: keeping a model from saying something you will regret
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