I wrote a small tool for myself as my biannual routine check of where llms are currently at. I think I've learned a bunch from this exercise. This is frustrating! I don't want to learn by trial and error, I'd rather read someone's blog post with lessons learned. Sadly, most of the writing on the topic that percolates to me tends to be high-level --- easy to nod along while reading, but hard to extract actionable lessons. So this is what I want to do here, list specific tricks learned.