Maksim Danilchenko

Software engineer. Writing about AI tools, industry news, tech, and programming.

Donald Knuth's 'Claude's Cycles': When AI Solved a Problem the Father of CS Couldn't

TL;DR Donald Knuth — the 87-year-old creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming — published a paper called “Claude’s Cycles” after Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 solved an open graph theory problem he’d been stuck on for weeks. The AI found a working construction in 31 guided explorations over about an hour. Knuth then wrote the formal proof himself. His opening words: “Shock! Shock!” The paper pulled 635,000 views in hours and reignited the debate about what AI can actually contribute to mathematics. ...

March 25, 2026 · 8 min · Maksim

AI Coding Tools Are Doubling Secret Leak Rates — What the 2026 GitGuardian Report Means for You

TL;DR GitGuardian dropped their State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report on March 17th. The headline number: 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets pushed to public GitHub repos in 2025. That’s a 34% year-over-year increase — the largest single-year jump they’ve ever recorded. The culprit they’re pointing at? AI coding assistants. Commits made with AI help leak secrets at 2x the baseline rate. Claude Code specifically sits at a 3.2% leak rate. ...

March 24, 2026 · 9 min · Maksim

Cursor vs Claude Code vs Windsurf in 2026: Which AI Coding Tool Actually Wins?

TL;DR Cursor is the best AI-powered IDE if you want everything in one window. Claude Code is the most capable agent — period — and dominates complex, multi-file tasks from the terminal. Windsurf is the budget pick that punches above its price. Most serious devs I know (myself included) run Cursor + Claude Code together. That combo is hard to beat. Why This Comparison Matters Right Now Eight months ago, Claude Code didn’t exist. Now it’s the #1 rated AI coding tool, with 46% of developers calling it their “most loved” in recent surveys. Cursor crossed a million users. Windsurf quietly built a loyal following with aggressive pricing. The field moved fast, and most comparison articles are already outdated. ...

March 24, 2026 · 10 min · Maksim

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot Pricing 2026: What You Actually Pay

TL;DR Cursor Pro is $20/month. GitHub Copilot Individual is $10/month. If those were the only numbers that mattered, this would be a short article. They’re not. Under real agentic workloads, Cursor’s sticker price can climb 5x. Copilot’s model quality ceiling is lower, but the budget stays predictable. Which one costs less depends almost entirely on how you code — and whether you’ve gone all-in on agents. The Advertised Price Is Not the Real Price Every pricing comparison you’ll find leads with $10 vs. $20. That framing made sense in 2024 when AI coding tools were autocomplete engines. In 2026 they’re running agents that open files, run tests, edit across dozens of files, and call the model hundreds of times per session. ...

March 24, 2026 · 7 min · Maksim

Musk's Terafab: A $25 Billion Bet on Building AI Chips from Scratch

TL;DR Elon Musk just announced Terafab — a joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas, with a price tag of $20–25 billion. The plant aims to produce custom AI inference chips (AI5) and radiation-hardened space processors (D3) at 2nm, targeting one terawatt of annual compute. The ambition is staggering. The execution challenges are even more staggering. TSMC spent 50 years getting where it is, and Tesla has never manufactured a single chip. ...

March 24, 2026 · 8 min · Maksim