Engineering Practice

Conclusion first: there are a lot of third-party Telegram clients, quality varies wildly, and you should avoid the closed-source ones as a rule. Since 2021, Telegram has required first-time registration to receive its verification code on the official mobile client — desktop and third-party clients can’t register directly. That’s already a signal. Third-party Telegram clients by platform: an overview This post is a curated list. The source is a roundup post by Telegram’s @LCGFX; I’ve reorganized it by platform and added open-source status and risk judgments.

Signing up for services like GPT, Claude, or Telegram needs a number that can receive verification codes — but you may not want to hand over your own phone number. That demand spawned a batch of SMS verification platforms: some free, some paid, some aimed at developers. Here are four I’ve actually used; as of May 20, 2026, all were still accessible. Platform status changes at any time, so open the site and check yourself before using one.

Packing multiple probabilistically sampled large language model instances into a single codebase or production pipeline is, fundamentally, constructing a distributed system over an unreliable network using stochastic state machines. The axiomatic foundations of classical distributed computing—deterministic state transitions, reproducible failure modes, Byzantine fault tolerance, and atomic commits—collapse almost entirely when applied to modern generative models. Tech social media abounds with utopian product demos: one agent searches documentation, another implements business logic, a third writes unit tests, and a fourth conducts code review, while an orchestrator agent glides over the process like an infallible engineering manager. Yet anyone who has pushed such topologies into a 500,000-line monolithic repository or a high-concurrency production environment knows the reality: the system rapidly degenerates into distributed chaos. Unsynchronized modifications cause silent overwrites and split-brain states; non-deterministic rollouts cause cognitive divergence; token consumption explodes in a positive-feedback avalanche; and parent and child processes lock each other in cognitive livelocks.

A 67 MB DMG installer, 164 MB unpacked, hiding Anthropic’s Claude Science (internal codename Operon). After reverse engineering it, I found 54 SQLite tables, a 9-layer security model, 30+ bioinformatics skills, and a complete AI agent platform for computational biology. On the other side is TCMSP, an AI-native Traditional Chinese Medicine systems pharmacology platform under active development. Looking at the two projects side by side, some design ideas are worth cross-referencing.

Update note: This post is based on the Codex App as of May 2026. SSH Remote is still in alpha, and the configuration methods and UI entry points may change with new releases. If anything here has gone stale, refer to the official documentation for the latest. The Codex App now supports connecting to remote machines over SSH; the feature is currently in alpha. If you develop on remote servers, train models, or run environments there, this is worth a try. It lets you connect to a remote server directly inside Codex and work in the remote filesystem and shell — no more jumping back and forth between a local terminal, VSCode Remote, SSH, and tmux.

Running out of memory is the norm on Linux devices — especially small-memory VPSes, Raspberry Pis, and old laptops. The traditional fix is adding a SWAP partition, but many people find the box actually gets laggier after adding one. Starting from how things work under the hood, this post compares SWAP and ZRAM so you know exactly which to use in which scenario, and how to configure them.

The VPS scene runs on a distinctive system of slang that reads like hieroglyphics to newcomers. This post collects the common terms and abbreviations so you can get up to speed fast. People and Identity # MJJ # Originally referred to users hanging around the Hostloc forum; now a blanket term for anyone obsessed with tinkering with VPSes. It comes from a Hostloc forum meme, short for 买鸡鸡/没鸡鸡 (“bought a chicken / no chicken” — interpret it however you like). It started as a slur but gradually evolved into a self-deprecating badge of in-group identity, and in most contexts today it carries no malice (though some also use MJJ for players who pay little and demand much).

Preface # In the author’s own words, Pi Coding Agent is an opinionated, minimalist coding agent. After using it for a while, I consider it one of the best AI agent CLIs available today. Projects that blow up tend to attract low-quality issues and AI-generated PRs, and the name pi is a clever touch — it gets associated with the mathematical constant, which is exactly what the author intended: keep the profile low and the community quality high.

I originally wrote this post for a friend; I’m just cleaning it up a bit and publishing it. I’ll assume you’ve never touched domain email, Cloudflare Workers, SMS-code platforms, registration bots, or AI API relays before. Wherever possible I’ll explain things in terms of “why this step exists” and “how to confirm you did it right”. When you get stuck, you can just paste the error into an AI and ask — in my testing, Codex handles this kind of deployment doc and config troubleshooting reasonably well. But sanitize API keys, passwords, cookies, and tokens before sending them to an AI. Don’t ask me how I know.

Claude Code Skill in Anywhere Implementing Claude Skills’ Progressive Disclosure via MCP: Reusing Claude Code Skills Anywhere # — A feasible approach to capability encapsulation and dynamic context extension (technical proposal and verification) # Preface # Claude Skills introduced a remarkably advanced concept: encapsulating professional knowledge, process standards, and task methods into “skill packages” that load dynamically, only when a task actually needs them.