Field notes

Notes and opinions from building AI, VR, and web systems for real organisations.

• Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash all along, and the price is the point

  August 26, 2026 — The free mystery model that broke OpenRouter's records is Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash: 320B, MIT license, open weights, and about 30x cheaper than Claude Opus.

• The full DeepSeek runs on a single RTX card now, no distill, no cloud

  August 25, 2026 — A free two-week-old engine, FreeToken, runs the full DeepSeek on a single RTX card. Where it fits next to Ollama, LM Studio and Unsloth Studio.

• Stripe bought OpenRouter, and the aggregator just got aggregated

  August 24, 2026 — OpenRouter's pitch was avoiding lock-in. Now it belongs to Stripe. What 8 billion actually buys, and why the meter matters more than the models.

• Qwen3.8-27B runs on my own machine now, and it's genuinely good

  August 17, 2026 — Qwen3.8-27B is out under Apache 2.0, fits in a 17GB download, and runs on hardware you already own. What that changes in practice.

• Claude now watermarks its text, including whatever helped me write this

  August 11, 2026 — Anthropic confirmed Claude marks its output with an invisible watermark. What it actually catches, what it can't, and why it runs backwards.

• Grok Bot is an AI coworker with its own computer, and all your logins

  August 11, 2026 — xAI shipped Grok Bot, an always-on agent that signs into your real tools and works 24/7. One genuinely new idea, wrapped in a trust problem.

• MCP just went stateless, and its servers got a lot easier to run

  August 9, 2026 — The MCP spec dropped sessions and went stateless. What that changes whether you use AI tools, deploy MCP servers, or built your own.

• Qwen3.8 is open-weight, and one version fits on your laptop

  August 3, 2026 — Alibaba made Qwen3.8 open-weight and undercut the closed flagships on price. What the giant Max model and its laptop-sized sibling mean for the rest of us.

• New season, new contender: Kimi K3 shows up open-weight

  July 19, 2026 — Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model to crack the frontier top 3. Where Claude, OpenAI and Moonshot land this season, and what your $100 actually buys.

• Why VR training pilots stall

  July 19, 2026 — Most VR training pilots die between the demo and the rollout. The headset is never the problem. The missing system around it is.