News on Jake Quist

'Cheap Chinese Models' Aren't Cheap

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

I have a small side project in the works: Kanjiland. It’s a reading comprehension engine for Japanese language learners. It’s a model trained to help identify the structure of Japanese text. Raw Japanese goes in, structured grammar and annotated furigana comes out. If you’re an intermediate or advanced Japanese language learner, this model is for you™.

To train this model, I need more data than just English ⇔ Japanese translations. What I really need is the annotated grammar and furigana (i.e. the readings of the individual characters). That kind of data doesn’t really exist on the open web. So I decided to distill the training data from the big labs. In other words, I’m going to pay the big labs some amount of money and have their models produce a large dataset that I can use to train my own model.

Where Do IDEs Go From Here?

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Remember the time when TUIs and terminal-based apps seemed like silly gimmicks? I would have chortled (yes, chortled) at the thought. Yet, here we are now. TUIs now seem like one of the smartest product decisions Anthropic could have made.

It’s interesting to relect on Cursor vs Anthropic’s approach to the coding interface problem. Because 6 months ago, it sure seemed like Cursor was making the right decisions and Anthropic wasn’t take AI coding very seriously.

What Happens To Developer Tools After Claude Code?

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re building a developer tool right now, you probably have a launch plan: Post it on Show HN. Grind for GitHub stars. Maybe host a hackathon or two. You know, the standard playbook.

I suspect this playbook will soon become obsolete. Not because it doesn’t work on humans, but because humans are no longer the ones choosing the tools.

It’s not that humans have left the loop. A human still decides which tools end up in a project. But increasingly, that decision gets mediated by an AI coding agent.

What Happens When AI Can Write All Your Software?

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, while refactoring some of my old code, I asked an LLM to write a RingBuffer implementation in TypeScript. I’ve written these before in other languages. I know the tricky edge cases, especially around concurrency. To my surprise — and mild horror — the LLM wrote it flawlessly. Better than I could have. No feedback necessary. No vibing at all.

Then I asked it to build something slightly more ambitious: a personal CRM.

Big Tech vs. OpenClaw

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenClaw launched last week. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s essentially a way for AI to control your computer on your behalf. You describe what you want done, and it does it—clicking, typing, navigating, the whole thing.

It’s impressive technology. But the most interesting thing about OpenClaw isn’t what it can do. It’s what it means for the companies that have spent the last fifteen years figuring out how to capture and hold our attention.

OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere, and it’s not because people suddenly need more coffee table computers.

If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-5, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware. Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.