Blog

Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.

Series

LLMs from 2023 to Today: Open-Weight Models, Long Context and Reasoning

A summary of the LLM world from GPT-4 to today with verified dates: the rise of open-weight models with Llama, Mistral, Qwen and Gemma, the context window growing from 2,048 tokens to a million, models that read images, and the reasoning models that came with o1 and DeepSeek-R1. We also discuss the difference between open-weight and open source, and why we give no model ranking.

6 Nov 2026 6 min 6

Artificial Intelligence PART 09

Writing Prompts for LLMs (2): Step-by-Step Thinking and Reasoning Models

Does saying think step by step guarantee the right answer? We ask gemma3:4b a tricky order calculation in three ways, separate the thinking from the answer with qwen3:4b's think parameter, use ReasoningOptions in C# and measure what thinking costs in tokens and time.

6 Nov 2026 11 min 8