Martin Alderson

Martin Alderson

Cofounder at catchmetrics.io.

I write about the intersection of software engineering and economics, with a focus on the AI transformation. I've worked on dozens of enterprise software projects and enjoy the balance between commercial success and pragmatic technical excellence.

"A lot of great/interesting reading, thank you!"

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder

Latest

Managed agents are the new Lambda

Managed agents (cloud-hosted agent harnesses) are powerful, but locking yourself into a frontier lab's platform now is risky - here's why and what to do instead.

Open weights are quietly closing up - and that's a problem

Open weights models keep frontier labs honest on price. If they disappear, we end up with a handful of oligopolists extracting consumer surplus.

29th August 2026: a scenario

A fictional scenario about what AI changes for cloud security, written because the technical version of the argument doesn't land with anyone except engineers.

Local LLM speed calculator

A back-of-envelope tokens/sec estimator for running LLMs locally. Pick your memory, model size and quantization to see how fast it'll actually run.

Most Read

Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

Figma's reliance on non-designer seats made it uniquely exposed to AI. Claude Design's launch deepens the problem.

Why Claude's new 1M context length is a big deal

Anthropic's 1M token context window on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 is a genuine breakthrough - and they're not even charging more for it.

No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

The viral claim that Anthropic loses $5,000 per Claude Code subscriber doesn't survive basic scrutiny. Let's do the actual maths.

Which web frameworks are most token-efficient for AI agents?

I benchmarked 19 web frameworks on how efficiently an AI coding agent can build and extend the same app. Minimal frameworks cost up to 2.9x fewer tokens than full-featured ones.

Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files

Anthropic's 'legal tool' that triggered a $285bn selloff is 156KB of markdown. The panic reveals a hard truth about the future of software.