AI Personas in Practice, Edge LLMs on a Z80, and Performance Pitfalls to Watch
NEWSLETTER | Amplifi Labs
AI Personas Give Stakeholders Instant, Multi-persona Feedback on Decisions
Smashing Magazine • December 23, 2025
This piece outlines how to centralize surveys, interviews, tickets, analytics, and prior personas into an AI-accessible repository, then generate interactive functional personas that the AI consults to answer stakeholder questions with consolidated, multi-perspective guidance. Implementations range from simple setups in ChatGPT Projects, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini to a Notion-based knowledge base, with persona “lenses” for marketing/product/support and guardrails that flag when fresh user research is required. The approach shifts UX from report creation to maintaining a living repository, putting user insight on-demand in daily decision flows without replacing real user validation.
Applied AI and Agentic Dev Tools
Koine exposes Claude Code as secure REST API with SDKs
Around the web •December 25, 2025
Koine is an HTTP gateway that wraps Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI into a network-accessible REST API, with TypeScript and Python SDKs for easy integration. It enables programmatic use of Claude Code’s agentic capabilities (file I/O, shell, tools) with persistent sessions and typed, structured responses for services and pipelines. Deployed via Docker with API-key auth, it’s dual-licensed (AGPL/commercial) and intended for internal networks to maintain isolation and security.
40KB, 2‑bit quantized chatbot runs natively on a Z80
Around the web •December 29, 2025
Z80‑μLM is an open-source, quantization‑aware trained micro language model that runs entirely on a 4MHz Z80 with 64KB RAM as a ~40KB CP/M .COM, bundling inference, weights, and a chat UI. It uses trigram hashing (128 buckets), 2‑bit weights with 16‑bit integer inference, and autoregressive character output, and ships with two demos: a terse “tinychat” and a 20 Questions “guess” game. Beyond retro appeal, the repo and TRAINING.md illustrate practical patterns for extreme model compression and on‑device inference, with data tooling via Ollama or Claude—useful inspiration for embedded and edge AI.
Performance, Runtimes, and Systems Engineering
Unity’s Mono bottleneck: Modern .NET delivers 2–3x faster C#
Around the web •December 28, 2025
Benchmarks comparing Unity 6/Mono to .NET 10 show 2–3x speedups on real workloads (e.g., 100s→38s in debug, 30s→12s in release) and up to 15x in microbenchmarks, driven by Mono’s weaker JIT and missed optimizations. Unity’s CoreCLR modernization is on the 6.x roadmap but not production-ready until 2026; when it lands, expect faster runtime and iteration plus access to Span<T>, intrinsics, and newer SIMD, while IL2CPP AOT remains and CoreCLR AOT isn’t planned. Until then, isolating simulation/business logic to run under modern .NET for tests can dramatically reduce iteration time versus the Unity editor.
Static Linking at Scale: x86_64’s 2GiB Relocation Barrier
Around the web •December 29, 2025
In mega codebases that statically link services, x86_64’s 32-bit PC‑relative CALL encoding caps jump distance at ±2 GiB, leading to relocation overflows when functions land too far apart. The post demonstrates the failure via a custom linker script and shows -mcmodel=large as a workaround, which converts calls to movabs+indirect call—trading correctness for larger code (5→12 bytes per call) and added register pressure. For teams producing multi‑GB ELF binaries, code layout and code‑model choices become critical to avoid link failures and performance regressions.
Qt/QML block editor outperforms Electron/Flutter in mega-text benchmarks
Around the web •December 26, 2025
A technical deep-dive shows how a Qt 6 C++/QML stack—ListView delegates for blocks atop a QAbstractListModel, pooled-item reuse, compound undo/redo, and “Markdown-under-cursor” WYSIWYG—can yield a complex, native‑like editor. Benchmarks loading War and Peace hit 0.33s on a 2017 MacBook Air and 2.66s for 20× on an M1 (Bike is similar), far ahead of Electron/Flutter editors that stalled or required tens of seconds. The piece also shares CI/CD tips for cross‑platform packaging and announces that the block editor is available for licensing, with mobile + sync on the roadmap.
C++ 'finally' via RAII: pitfalls when destructors throw
Around the web •December 28, 2025
C++ emulates try/finally with RAII (e.g., wil::scope_exit), but if a destructor (or scope guard) throws while unwinding another exception, the program terminates—unlike Java/Python/C#/JS, which propagate the finally exception and lose the original. Practical takeaway: make destructors noexcept, catch/handle inside scope guards, or use wil::scope_exit_log to log-and-suppress; avoid MSVC __try/__finally in C++ as they don’t interoperate cleanly with C++ exceptions.
Tools, Search, and Engineering Culture
Nonprofit, Ad-Free Search Engine Offers DDG Bangs, No AI
Around the web •December 29, 2025
A not-for-profit web search engine drops ads and AI-generated overlays while preserving DuckDuckGo-style !bangs for fast site-specific queries. Developers who prefer raw, unannotated results and keyboard-friendly shortcuts may find it a lean alternative for research or as a default search provider.
Why Productive Cynicism Helps Engineers Drive Impact in Big Tech
Around the web •December 28, 2025
The essay argues that a small, pragmatic dose of cynicism—accepting organizational politics and constraints—helps engineers ship meaningful, large-scale improvements rather than retreat into unproductive idealism. By engaging with incentives and influencing stakeholders, engineers can translate company strategy into user-facing changes while avoiding the trap of believing big tech is inherently conspiratorial or incompetent. The takeaway: understand incentives, negotiate tradeoffs, and use political capital to land features that matter.
