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. ...