Every few weeks a new model dominates the timeline. The launch posts look the same every time: a cherry-picked demo, a benchmark chart, a wall of flame emojis — and no answer to the question that actually matters to me, which is "will this thing handle the boring, weird, half-documented work in my repos?"
I learned this the expensive way. I once adopted a trending model based on launch-day enthusiasm and spent a night cleaning up hallucinated CLI flags it had emitted with total confidence. Since then, every model that wants into my workflow has to pass a small deck of adversarial tasks I wrote myself. This post is the full method.
Launch metrics answer launch questions, not yours
Benchmarks are legitimate science — for the benchmark's questions. Your codebase asks different ones:
Does the model follow your formatter and your naming conventions without being told twice?
