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Backgrind

30 stories

Stories

  • OpenAI open-sourced the Codex harness: what you actually got

    OpenAI just made the engine under Codex an Apache-2.0 platform — codex exec, the SDK, and the JSON-RPC app-server. The pitch is one number: harness changes alone took the same model from 13.3% to 38.3% on ARC-AGI-3 with 6x fewer tokens.

    Backgrind Blog10 min read
  • Ox Alpha: who is behind OpenRouter's free mystery model?

    A nameless model with a 1M-token context dropped on OpenRouter and OpenCode, free for a week, and nobody has claimed it. The forensic trail — a leaked Java stack trace, error code 1214, 30/30 tokenizer matches — points hard at Zhipu’s next GLM.

    Backgrind Blog10 min read
  • Meta Muse Code: install, pricing, and how it compares to Claude Code

    Meta's first terminal coding agent launched with a benchmark chart it loses — and a design worth stealing: background agents that persist all session, sub-agents fanned into isolated git worktrees, and a 12–21x discount if you let Meta train on your code.

    Backgrind Blog10 min read
  • Measuring whether a coding agent is actually helping

    The three metrics every team reaches for first — lines written, acceptance rate, self-reported time saved — are the three that reward an agent producing more code than you needed.

    Backgrind Blog20 min read
  • Which config file actually wins?

    Your personal setting is being ignored, or the repo's is — and the reason is that the direction of precedence is not the same for every mechanism. settings.json lets the repo beat your laptop; skills let your laptop beat the repo; CLAUDE.md lets nothing beat anything; permission rules refuse to…

    Backgrind Blog19 min read
  • Hooks in the Claude Agent SDK: every event, measured

    The programmatic hooks you pass in options.hooks, not the shell hooks in settings.json — and the difference matters, because by default both fire in the same run. We registered a callback on all 31 events and ran it until we had the thing nobody publishes: the measured firing order.

    Backgrind Blog19 min read
  • Running a coding agent in CI: the walls, in the order you hit them

    The agent gets one shot, on a machine with no browser and nobody to ask — which changes which failures you get. We ran four headless arms on one real failing test: the locked-down run with no allowlist was denied Bash and Edit, wrote nothing, exited 0, reported subtype "success" and cost $0.383 —…

    Backgrind Blog21 min read
  • Letting an agent write your tests

    The one job everyone hands an agent first, and the one place a wrong answer looks exactly like a right one. We gave Claude Code the same 7-line function twice — once with the implementation, once with only a spec — then broke the code nine ways to see which suite noticed.

    Backgrind Blog15 min read
  • Running a coding agent inside a container

    The thing people reach for the moment they want to stop approving every command — and the one fear it does not remove. A real Dockerfile, a default-deny egress firewall measured before and after, and the four things that break first: a build-arg token that shows up in docker history three times…

    Backgrind Blog20 min read
  • Migrating a large codebase with an agent

    A migration is not one task, it is a thousand nearly identical ones — and that changes how you drive it. The pilot-then-rules-then-batches shape, and the part everyone skips: a codemod beats the agent on the mechanical 80%.

    Backgrind Blog16 min read
  • Managing context in a long Claude Code session

    The window is the constraint everything else follows from, and file reads are what fill it — about 31% of a representative session, against 1% for your own prompts. What /compact and /clear each do, and the part nobody warns you about: compaction does not bring everything back.

    Backgrind Blog17 min read
  • Gemini CLI: install, configure, and where it fits

    Google's terminal agent is the only one of the three with a free tier that works without a card — 1,000 model requests a day on a plain Google sign-in. The three auth paths and what each actually meters, why GEMINI.md silently ignores your AGENTS.md, the nested settings.json shape, MCP and…

    Backgrind Blog16 min read
  • What an AI coding agent actually costs — and how to spend less

    The subscription-vs-API crossover is a computable number, not a matter of taste — and the tokens go almost nowhere people assume. We run a 40-turn Opus 5 session at $13.20 uncached and $2.86 warm, work the break-even for Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x, price the same session across four models at a clean…

    Backgrind Blog19 min read
  • Codex CLI notifications: how the notify hook actually works

    The notify hook has exactly one event, hands you the payload as an argv argument rather than on stdin, and can never block a tool call. The verified payload shape, a runnable script, per-run vs global wiring, and when to reach for lifecycle hooks instead.

    Backgrind Blog11 min read

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