Hey, I am
a Quality-oriented Software Engineer with a passion for building products that are easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to maintain.
Yesterday, something unexpected happened. OpenAI - yes, the company everyone's been calling "ClosedAI" for the past five years - dropped two open-weight models. And not just any models. We're talking about reasoning models that match o4-mini and o3-mini performance. On a single GPU. For free.
Let me say that again: OpenAI just gave away billions of dollars worth of AI research under Apache 2.0. No strings attached.
I used to obsess over writing "good code." You know the perfectly structured classes, clever design patterns, spending hours debating whether to use a factory or a builder. Then one day, I watched a colleague ship a hacky script that increased our conversion rate by 20%. My beautiful, untested feature? Still sitting in a branch somewhere.
That's when it hit me: maybe we're thinking about this all wrong.