GLM Is the New Hotness, So Let's Test It On the Homelab
·14 min read
GLM is suddenly everywhere in developer conversations. Before we run the bakeoff, we need to answer two questions: what is GLM, and is it suitable for a single RTX 5090 homelab?
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// Posts tagged: ai
Thursday Thoughts: Every Intern Is a Builder Now
·5 min read
A finance intern is spending her summer observing business processes and vibe coding automation tools. Not a CS major. Not shadowing someone. Building something real. It is a small example that says something big about how AI is reshaping internships, careers, and what the word "developer" actually means.
Vibe Coding Has Entered the Enterprise, and Governance Is Next
·5 min read
Vibe coding has moved from hobbyist curiosity to enterprise rollout across knowledge workers, and the next wave of AI adoption will be defined by governance and token economics.
Thursday Thoughts: The AI Gut Check for Startups
·3 min read
A CEO panel at an AI event sparked a simple but powerful question every startup founder should ask themselves: does your business get better as AI models improve, or does it get worse?
Model Showdown Round 7: Five Local Models vs. One Cloud Model on a Real Coding Task
·13 min read
I gave five local LLMs and one frontier cloud model the same coding task on my homelab: build a tag manager for the blog's admin panel. Only two shipped anything. Here's what happened.
Frontier Bakeoff: We Benchmarked Fable 5 Hours Before the Shutdown
·8 min read
Four frontier models, ten tasks, one government shutdown. We ran Claude Fable 5 through the homelab benchmark harness three hours before Anthropic pulled the plug — and it came in second. Here's the full bakeoff.
Thursday Thoughts: The Models We Can't Run
·7 min read
DeepSeek V4-Pro, V4-Flash, and Zyphra ZAYA1 are three of the most exciting new models in local AI. None of them run on our RTX 5090 homelab — for completely different reasons. Here's the research, the math, and what it means for anyone building a local inference rig.
Model Showdown Round 4: Opus vs Qwen — Writers, Not Coders
·13 min read
Two AI models got the same prompt: review the blog fodder, check for redundancy, and draft a post. Opus chose a debugging war story. Qwen chose a data-driven redesign. Neither picked the same fodder. Here's what the difference reveals about how models think about content.
Model Showdown Round 3: Ditching Ollama in Favor of llama.cpp
·17 min read
We ripped out Ollama, migrated to llama.cpp, and benchmarked five local models across 12 tasks on an RTX 5090. The results surprised us — and the winner wasn't who we expected.
Slaying the Gemma Beast: How We Fixed Local AI and Shipped Search
·17 min read
Gemma 4 failed to build a single feature in our last test. This time we diagnosed the problem, switched from Ollama to llama.cpp, tuned the inference settings, and Gemma shipped a working search feature to production. Then Opus reviewed the code and made it better. Here's what we learned about making local models actually work.
The Agentic Gap: Claude Oneshots, Gemma Fails
·12 min read
We pitted Gemma 4 against Opus 4.6 on a real feature build for vibescoder.dev. Gemma is the fastest model in our benchmark. It also couldn't finish the job. Here's what happened when we stopped testing toy apps and started building production code.
Model Showdown Round 2: Adding Gemma, Kimi, and 579 GB of Stubborn Optimism
·15 min read
We added Google's Gemma 4 and Moonshot's 1-trillion-parameter Kimi K2 to the local model benchmark. Five out of six models scored perfect. Gemma 4 is the new speed king. And yes, we ran a 579 GB model off an NVMe drive — at 0.6 tokens per second.
Model Showdown: Benchmarking Local vs Cloud LLMs on a Real Coding Task
·18 min read
We gave six LLM models the exact same coding prompt and measured everything: speed, tokens, and whether the code actually works. Three models scored perfect. Two built the wrong kind of app. One ran out of tokens mid-line.