In Neovim, a pasted secret can reach the screen for one frame before the mask catches up, and a recording keeps that frame. I measured what cloak.nvim, shelter.nvim and camouflage.nvim draw while you type and paste, what they cost, and which files they can read.
TypeScript in Go, Vite on Rolldown, Biome instead of ESLint and Prettier, uv on the Python side. In eighteen months most of the tools that used to be written in the language they process were replaced by native ones. I moved a monorepo across to all of them. This is the before and after, and the two places where the rewrite isn't a free win.
I moved commit messages, log triage, PR summaries, test naming and half a dozen other small jobs from a hosted API to an open-weight model on my laptop. Cost had nothing to do with it. For this kind of task a 30B model on a MacBook can't be told apart from the frontier, and I'd rather the data never left the machine.
Every team that adopted MCP hit the same wall by spring: forty tools in the context, a model that picks the wrong one, and a bill that grew with every server added. Skills, the folder-of-markdown pattern that spread through coding agents this year, fix a different problem from the one MCP fixes. Knowing which is which decides whether your agent gets better or just bigger.