Engineering Practice

An email popped up in my inbox today: “You can just build things, enjoy 6 months on us.” Sender: the Codex team at OpenAI. The first line, in big letters: “You’re in.” Then: “Thanks for maintaining open source projects.” I stared at that line three times and couldn’t help laughing out loud. Free ride: secured A while back I filled out their Codex for Open Source application on a whim. Didn’t expect much — I just listed the PRs I’d submitted to context-mode, plus my own byf and dev-skills.

The direct links below always point to the latest local build: Windows # Version Link x64 (user installer) https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/win32-x64-user/cursor-local/latestWindows ARM64 https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/win32-arm64-user/cursor-local/latestWindows macOS # Version Link Apple Silicon (M-series, recommended) https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/darwin-arm64-user/cursor-local/latestMac Intel chips https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/darwin-x64-user/cursor-local/latestMac Universal https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/darwin-universal-user/cursor-local/latestMac Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) # Version Link x64 AppImage https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/linux-x64-user/cursor-local/latestLinux ARM64 AppImage https://api2.cursor.sh/updates/download/golden/linux-arm64-user/cursor-local/latestLinux

Let me start with something that actually happened. In early 2025, I added a feature to an internal system: export to Excel. Small requirement — I didn’t even write it up, just typed “add an export button to the list page” into the chat box. The AI delivered in ten minutes. Frontend changes, new endpoint, SQL — all in one pass. I was pleased when I opened the PR, right up until review revealed: the export columns didn’t match the list page, a hundred thousand rows would hang the service outright, there was no permission check, and the tests only covered the happy path.

Attachment download: Agent Interview Questions.pdf — handy for printing or offline reading Why Would You Need Multiple Agents # An opening question to separate people who have “read the articles” from people who have “actually built one”. The bad answer: “Multi-agent enables parallel processing, which improves system throughput and robustness.” Every word of that is correct, but if you follow up with “so after splitting into two agents, did throughput actually double?”, they stall. The reality: inter-agent communication has overhead, coordination has complexity, and after the split total throughput may well drop. Adding agents is not like adding CPU cores.

The most annoying thing about coding with AI isn’t that it writes bugs — it’s that it writes them differently every time. Same requirement, three conversations, three implementations. The standards live in your head; the AI doesn’t know them. Trellis tries to solve this. It’s not yet another AI coding assistant — it’s a framework for injecting project standards into AI: the AI reads your standards before writing code, gets checked automatically after writing, and once the check is done, anything newly learned gets distilled back into the standards. The more you use it, the better the AI knows your project.

Conclusion first: this is not another “type a topic → force it into a template → output garbage” AI PPT tool. It runs a complete expert workflow — requirement research, material retrieval, outline planning, layout planning, visual design — where every step allows manual fine-tuning, or the whole thing can run automatically end to end. In terms of output, pages generated with Gemini 3 Flash already reach commercial delivery quality.

You SSH into a server to run a long task, the network drops, and the task is gone. Tmux exists to solve exactly this — it decouples the terminal session from the window, so the process keeps running after you close the terminal. Tmux's three layers: a Session contains Windows, a Window contains Panes The Core Problem It Solves # An ordinary terminal window is bound to its processes. Close the window and the processes die. Same story when SSH drops.

We often see URLs like these: 1 2 3 /v1/chat/completions /v1/messages /v1/responses These suffixes are not decoration — they define a complete request and response data structure. Pick the wrong one and your code either errors out or silently loses data. This article starts at /v1/completions and works its way to /v1/responses, explaining what each suffix stands for, why it was designed that way, and where the common pitfalls are.

Oracle’s Always Free plan gives you a 4-core, 24 GB ARM server every month — no expiry, no charge. The same specs cost $80–100/month on AWS. This post strings together signup, pitfalls, instance creation, and keep-alive. Oracle free VPS: the full path from preparation to running What You Get # Oracle’s free tier is called Always Free. Not a trial, not a limited-time promo.

Codex talks to the ChatGPT backend over WebSocket by default. If your network path involves Clash, a corporate proxy, cross-border transit, or Cloudflare challenge pages, that long-lived WebSocket gets killed easily — and you end up staring at Reconnecting... 1/5 over and over. Turn off WebSocket and switch to plain HTTP streaming requests, and the problem mostly disappears. Comparison of the four fixes Why WebSocket Breaks Behind Proxies # The WebSocket protocol starts with an HTTP Upgrade request; only after the server returns 101 does it switch to the long-lived connection. That long-lived connection is exactly where the problem sits — proxy servers, firewalls, and CDN nodes all run timeout policies on idle connections, and Cloudflare’s challenge mechanism can inject an interstitial page mid-path. Any link in that chain kills the connection, and the Codex client starts Reconnecting.