Don't Worry About the Vase

Benchmarks have never been less useful for telling us which models are best.

They are good for giving a general sense of the landscape. They definitely paint a picture. But if you’re comparing top models, like GPT-5.4 against Opus 4.6 against Gemini 3.1 Pro, you have to use the models, talk to the models, get reports from those who have and form a gestalt. The reports will contract each other and you have to work through that. There’s no other way.

Thus, I try to gather and sort a reasonably comprehensive set of reactions, so you can browse the sections that make you most curious.

It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff.

The comments here can double as a place for GPT-5.4 reactions, in addition to my Twitter thread. I hope to get that review out soon.

Almost all of this will be a summary of agentic coding developments, after a note.

Table of Contents

1. The Virtue of Silence (Unrelated Update).
2. Agentic Coding Offers Mundane Utility.
3. Agentic Coding Doesn’t Offer Mundane Utility.
4. Huh, Upgrades.
5. Our Price Cheap.
6. Quickly, There’s No Time.
7. A Particular Set Of Skills.
8. Next Level Coding.
9. Dual Wielding.
10. They Took Our Jobs.
11. You Need To Relax Sometimes.
12. Levels of Friction.
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This was the worst week I have had in quite a while, maybe ever.

The situation between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW) spun completely out of control. Trump tried to de-escalate by putting out a Truth merely banning Anthropic from direct use by the Federal Government with a six month wind down. Then Secretary of War Hegseth went rogue and declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, with wording indicating an intent to outright murder Anthropic as a company.

Then that evening OpenAI signed a contact with DoW,

I’ve been trying to figure out the situation and help as best I can. I’ve been in a lot of phone calls, often off the record. Conduct is highly unbecoming and often illegal, arbitrary and capricious. The house is on fire, the Republic in peril. I have people lying to me and being lied to by others. There is fog of war. One gets it from all sides. It’s terrifying to think about what might happen with one wrong move.

I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while. I am thrilled that today had sufficiently little news that I am comfortable posting this.

Gemini 3.1 scores very well on benchmarks, but most of us had the same reaction after briefly trying it: “It’s a Gemini model.”

And that was that, given our alternatives. But it’s got its charms.

Consider this a nice little, highly skippable break.

The Pitch

It’s a good model, sir. That’s the pitch.

Sundar Pichai (CEO Google): Gemini 3.1 Pro is here. Hitting 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, it’s a step forward in core reasoning (more than 2x 3 Pro).

With a more capable baseline, it’s great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

We’re shipping 3.1 Pro across our consumer and developer products to bring this underlying leap in intelligence to your everyday applications right away.

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The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivations.

On its face, the conflict is a tale of three contracts and the associated working relationships.

1. The contract Anthropic signed with the Department of War (DoW) in 2025.
2. The new contract Anthropic was negotiating with DoW, that would have been modified to favor DoW, but where the parties could not reach agreement.
3. The contract OpenAI was negotiating and signed with DoW, which was per OpenAI modified favorably to OpenAI and thus may be modified further.

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Events continue to be fast and furious.

This was the first actually stressful week of the year.

That was mostly due to issues around Anthropic and the Department of War. This is the big event the news is not picking up, with the Pentagon on the verge of invoking one of two extreme options that would both be extremely damaging to national security and that would potentially endanger our Republic. The post has details, and the first section here has a few additional notes.

Also stressful for many was the impact of Citrini’s AI scenario, where it is 2028 and AI agents are sufficiently capable to disrupt the whole economy but this turns out to be bearish for stocks. People freaked out enough about this that it seems to have directly impacted the stock market, although most stocks other than the credit card companies seem to have bounced back. Of course, in a scenario like that we probably all die and definitely the world transforms, and you have bigger things to worry about than the stock market, but the post does raise a lot of very good detailed points, so I spend my post going over that.