What counts as proof when you pick a tool

What we're tracking

• •A benchmark for AI code review changes the conversation Most buying decisions about AI tools are made on anecdotes. Someone tried a product on a few examples, it looked impressive, and that story becomes the basis for a purchase. The trouble is that a handful of good demonstrations tells you almost nothing about how a tool behaves on the hundreds of ordinary cases you will actually feed it. A benchmark is the attempt to replace the anecdote with something comparable: a fixed set of tasks, an agreed definition of the right answer, and a scoring method that treats every tool the same way.
• •An AI interviewer at scale, and the cost of getting it wrong Scale changes the stakes of any decision. A process that makes a small error once is a nuisance. The same error repeated across a large population becomes a pattern, and in hiring a pattern can be unfair in ways that are slow to notice and hard to undo. That is the lens to use on the news that an AI interviewer has moved from pilot to volume.
• •Markdown in Docs, and why formats decide whether tools talk A file format is a quiet decision with loud consequences. When two tools store information in formats that understand each other, work flows between them without friction. When they do not, someone spends an afternoon copying, reformatting, and checking that nothing broke on the way across. The less glamorous half of any software stack is the plumbing that moves content from one place to another, and formats are that plumbing.
• •Stock charts in Sheets, and reading a number the right way A chart is an argument about what a number means. The same figures drawn two different ways can lead a reader to two different conclusions, which is why the choice of visualisation is not a cosmetic one. A price that moved within a wide range during a period looks calm if you plot only its closing value and volatile if you show the full span. The chart decides which story the reader sees first.
• •Customer satisfaction as a buying signal, and what it measures Awards and satisfaction scores are evidence, but they are a particular kind of evidence, and it helps to know what they do and do not tell you. A satisfaction award reflects how existing customers feel, which is useful precisely because those customers have lived with the product rather than watched a demonstration. It does not tell you whether the product fits your specific needs, and it should sit alongside your own trial rather than replace it.
• •The thread, pulled tight Four of today's five items are, underneath, the same story told in different registers. A benchmark asks what evidence should decide a purchase. An AI interviewer asks who should be doing the judging and at what scale. A format change asks whether your tools can carry evidence between them without loss. A satisfaction award asks how much weight a particular kind of evidence should carry. The useful habit for any buyer is to notice which kind of proof is in front of you and to ask the next question rather than the first one. A demo is a start, not a verdict. A benchmark score is a comparison, n