London · Engineer
Umar Salim.
Software engineer, shipping production systems since 2014 across startups, fintech, web3, and AI. I run Salim Consulting, building software and AI systems for clients.
Writing
All 47 posts- A First Look at Jev A first look at TypeSafe's Jev, the model that answers questions instead of writing. The cheapest paid LLM on OpenRouter matched it on accuracy for a fifth of the price, but Jev's probabilities were the best calibrated as they came, and twenty questions about one document cost a tenth per answer of asking one.
- The State of Local AI Image Generation Four open image models on one RTX 5090 against Nano Banana Pro and GPT Image 2.5, ten everyday prompts, scored blind. Three local models made nine usable images out of ten, and Z-Image Turbo did it in 2.6 seconds each. The newest, Qwen-Image-2.1, made six. Side by side, I still preferred a cloud image for nine prompts in ten.
- Qwen3.8-27B vs Opus 4.7 Bakeoff Qwen's model card puts its 27B above Opus on SWE-bench Pro. At Q4 on one RTX 5090, inside three different coding agents on three scored tasks, the local model matched Opus 4.7's scores and took 1.6 to 2.9 times as long to get there.
