Benjamin Lannon

Weeknotes #84 (June 13, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

I went ahead and finally set the Min Release Age setting for NPM which blocks installing new packages / versions that are under a day old (or whatever set of hours / days you wish). This will reduce the attack vector of a lot of supply chain attacks given most are found within a few hours and subsequently yanked from npm.

Things I consumed

WWDC 2026 was this past week and the main highlight was the new LLM powered Siri. Personally I was whelmed given it does finally work, but this is what was previewed 2 years ago and finally is landing this fall. I have tried it on my macbook air, but I feel we won't feel the full power of it until app developers integrate with it come this fall.
Claude Fable 5 was a model that was released this week that was at the knowledge level of Anthropic's Mythos model, but with security guardrails to prevent dangerous use of it. That said as of Friday night, the US Government requested it be blocked by any foriegn nationals and due to such, it is no longer available for anyone to use.

Weeknotes #83 (June 06, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription is an article that hits at the danger of just cause AI can build anything you want, you still have to put in the effort of making things that you wish to keep around and is actually valuable.
The divide of people who see the pros vs cons of AI coding continues, the maintainer of the jqwik java testing tool threw in what ends up as malware of trying to hijack a coding agent like claude code or codex, have it erase code, and then erase proof it did such. Andrew Nesbitt summarized the situation here: Protestware for coding agents
RTX Spark is Nvidia entering the consumer laptop and PC space with a chip originally found on their $4000 DGX Spark PCs. Windows on ARM has been tried over and over again without success yet, so I am skeptical, and especially given that this machine is going to start with 128GB of RAM in a time where memory is constrained feels like this is going to be at the top of the line of premium devices. That said, companies like Dell luckily are also looking at the other end of the market with their new $600 XPS 13 to compete with Apple's Macbook Neo.

Weeknotes #82 (May 30, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

I wrote a new entry on how I use AI as of May 2026 to see how things have changed over the past few months.
I vibe coded a simple CLI to view all variables and secrets from GitHub Actions in the case that my account was exposed somehow, secrets that may not be used anymore could be cleaned up.

Things I consumed

I finally took the dive and installed Immich on my local network as an alternative to Google Photos without any of the Generative AI features they've been progressively adding over time.
On Rendering Diffs was a post by the diffs.com team going over the complexity of rendering diffs and how they solved this issue as at a certain scale, the diff viewer in GitHub currently just doesn't work as you intend it to.
Found a fun YouTube video of a dev's Witch Hat Atelier Spell Simulator.

How I use AI in May 2026

Benjamin Lannon — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

5 months later after my previous post like this, I wanted to write another post seeing what my outlook is on AI.

How I use

Model: GPT-5.5, $20 OpenAI plan, stil don't hit limits. I previously used the paid Claude sub, but I've jumped back to GPT models specifically cause of the next point.
Harness: Codex App. When I saw the workflow of project categorized sidebar, I knew that was the UX I wanted, and the application works reasonably well. For small sessions I also may just use the Codex CLI.
Still fairly hands on and reading the majority of the code and the output of sessions with these coding agents.
Still not really using AI in apps that have AI features (Browsers, web apps, etc) outside apps specifically for AI. Also still not using AI for creative work (art, video) as well as writing.
I Removed sandboxes due to environment issues, where a agent tries to do something but the container does not have the command installed and I don't really like keep on rebuilding such.That said, I am still not using --yolo / --dangerously-skip-permissions modes. I still don't know how to protect against bad commands.

Apps I've built with AI

Weeknotes Collector mainly for initial UI, but backend is mainly handcoded.
TCG Tracker coded primarially with Claude Code and Codex. Claude handled some niche things (Tanstack, Convex) quite well. Very minimal AGENTS.md.

General Thoughts

Pricing is changing in some places (GitHub Copilot prices changing in June 2026, Anthropic switching to API pricing for programatic use, 3x higher API price for Gemini 3.5 Flash), but I am still using a subscription for my primary usage. Also, almost all of the providers now have a middle $100 a month tier the base $20 and max $200.
I use minimal amount of skills, have not used any MCP servers, and minimal AGENTS.md that I don't use too much of these unless I see the agents flailing over and over again.
- Of note, hand writing a few sentences in AGENTS.md seems to work well compared to having the model generate a long AI generated AGENTS.md file.

Weeknotes #81 (May 23, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

GitHub internal repos were leaked due to malware in a VS Code extension. This maily was triggered due to the fact that VS Code auto-updates extensions by default which allowed for this exploit to be triggered even though the malicious version of the extension only was up on the marketplace for under 20 minutes
As a follow up to this, people are recommending Microsoft add minimumReleaseAge for VS Code extensions such that it doesn't download brand new updates to be able to safeguard from this.
Also on the security front from Microsoft, npm is rolling out staged publishing where you have to have a approve a npm publish via a 2FA flow before it goes fully live. We shall see if this helps out protecting against the mass amount of supply chain attacks that have been hitting npm for the past few years.

Weeknotes #80 (May 16, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Forza Horizon 6 came out this past friday for people who bought the $120 premium edition, while it comes out for everyone else this coming Tuesday. Similar to previous entries in the Horizon franchise, but this time with a Japanese setting. What's impressive is over 170,000 people were playing it on Friday on Steam, which note is a higher amount of players than Forza Horizon 5 ever got on Steam.
Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is the 2nd movie in the Gundam Hathaway trilogy. I'll be seeing it in a few hours from now but have heard good things so far.
Anthropic has updated their policy on using a Claude Subscription. At its core, if you are using Claude outside of their UIs or CLIs, you will have to pay API pricing compared to the widely subsized prices the subscription gave you, but to offset this, they will provide equal amount of credits to your sub price to spend in these ways, which brings it in line with similar pricing structure to tools like OpenCode, Cursor, and the new pricing model for GitHub Copilot. I personally cancelled my sub to Claude about a month ago as I've been using OpenAI's Codex app more and didn't want to really pay for both, but these changes have not gotten a lot of positive response from developers at large.

Weeknotes #79 (May 09, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Sega and RGG presented more of their new RPG, Stranger than Heaven where it has a lot of vibes from their yakuza series, but alongside a music / showman mechanic that is core to the main character. No release date other than a window of this coming winter.
Node 26 finally is out after a few delays, where the Temporal API is now available to node. This version will enter a LTS cycle this October.
Modulus: Factory Automation is a new factory game that came out last month with a puzzle focus of breaking apart voxels into shapes to feed machines. Compared to other games in this genre, I feel there are some things that they need to change for quality of life like moving machines and conveyor belts about where games like Shapez 2 or Dyson Sphere Program do much better, but that said I feel if they incrementally build upon this core it definitely can become something that I am willing to play multiple playthroughs of the game.

Weeknotes #78 (May 02, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

The 2026 Steam Controller is on sale this coming Monday, May 4th. It takes a lot of the controls from the Steam Deck and brings it to a controller form-factor for $99. It is the first of 3 new hardware products from Valve expected to launch this year, to be followed up by the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame.
An Update on GitHub Availability, a post from the GitHub CTO going over some of the technicalites behind some major service disruptions, including one where merges were being reverted unintentionally. The thing I've analyzed is from the public eye, GitHub's main push has been GitHub Copilot which is leading to this higher load on their systems, so it feels like this is a blatant footgun, but as well, some of these bugs seem to beyond just load issues, so I gotta wonder if it is just the engineering culture at GitHub that is starting to stray due to no direct focus other than GitHub Copilot.
Related, GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing which means you'll be paying the API prices for all of the various models starting June 1st. Especially for larger models like GPT 5.5 or Claude Opus, using them from GitHub Copilot is going to cost a lot more given GitHub was previously subsidizing the various models such that the price you paid was lower than the raw API pricing. Curious to see if this change will see a harsh plateau or drop in usage for individual subscriptions.

Weeknotes #77 (April 25, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and handing reins to John Ternus this fall. Ternus is currently the SVP of Hardware at Apple, and with the critical success of Apple Silicon on the Mac which Ternus lead over the last 6 years, I have high hopes.
FFXIV 8.0: Evercold is the newest expansion for Final Fantasy 14 that will be coming out next January. Of note, The job action system is being streamlined as well as switching from a daily login cycle for running dungeons and other tasks to a weekly cycle so it is more welcoming for people that may not be able to play the game every single day.
The 1.0 release of Shapez 2 came out this week, and with it a new game mode, manufacture mode, was added which aligns the game more with other factory games rather than just focusing on the puzzle aspects.
Finally, I picked up Pragmata, Capcom's newest Action adventure game. It definitely has intense moments similar to Capcom's Resident Evil series, but instead of horror, you have to manage gunplay with a puzzle UI to enhance your damage in real time in a run-down moonbase setting.

Weeknotes #76 (April 18, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream came out this Thursday. It is the second entry in the series following the original game on the 3DS where I'd basically describe it as a Mii life sim with a mixture of Mad Libs.
As part of the movie night I do with my friends, we watched Sonatine, Beat Takeshi's directoral debut where it is a yakuza film with part drama and comedy in the usual Beat Takeshi fashion.
Claude Design is an expiriment by Anthropic to have a new layout of developing frontends and other visual designs using Claude behind the scenes. Definitely a shot at platforms like Lovable and Figma.
Claude Opus 4.7 also came out, but I don't really have an interest in it given these point releases aren't really revolutionizing how you use coding agents and the LLMs backing them, but rather just incremental improvements.