Five to Try


Five to Try · Issue #8 · Tuesday 27 October 2026

G'day, and happy Tuesday. Five releases from the weekend, why each one matters, and how to try it. The big labs had a quiet Sunday, so this week is one serious new open model and four smaller, cheerful finds: a safety net for code written by AI, a faithful copy of 1990s WordArt, a 1984 classic rebuilt for the Commodore 64, and a bitcoin dare that is really a reminder to update your website. Every one of them is free. About a five-minute read.

1. The big one: Nanbeige4.3-33B, a free open model built for coding agents

Eight bar charts comparing Nanbeige4.3-33B (teal) with Gemma4-31B, Muse-Glimmer-30B and Qwen3.8-27B on coding and agent tests, with Nanbeige highest on all eight


Image: Nanbeige LLM Lab (Hugging Face model card). Scores are Nanbeige's own.

Nanbeige LLM Lab, the AI team behind Chinese jobs platform BOSS Zhipin, has released Nanbeige4.3-33B, and anyone can download it. It's a 33-billion-parameter model built for "agentic" work: writing and fixing code on its own in a terminal, and office-style jobs like planning, automation and research. It can read up to 512,000 tokens at once, several long novels' worth. On Nanbeige's own tests it beats the best similar-sized open models (Qwen3.8-27B, Gemma4-31B and Muse-Glimmer-30B) on most coding and agent benchmarks, for example 80.9 against Qwen's 73.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1. It doesn't win everything: Qwen still edges it on SWE-Bench Pro (61.7 to 60.3) and GDPval. Nanbeige says this model is a "teacher", and a much smaller Nanbeige4.3-3B, trained from it, is next.

Why it matters: mid-size open models are the ones people actually run on their own hardware, and on paper this is now the strongest of them for coding agents. Independent tests haven't caught up yet, so treat the numbers as a promise rather than a fact.

TRY IT → free to download under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can use it commercially too. The full model is a 66 GB download and Nanbeige's own recipes use four GPUs. Within a day the community had made smaller 4-bit versions of about 16 GB to 21 GB, which suit a single graphics card or a Mac with plenty of memory. Hugging Face: Nanbeige4.3-33B · Nanbeige's announcement on X

2. Vibe coding: Farol shows you how risky an AI-written pull request really is

A Farol report for a pull request, marked "Careful review" with a merge risk score of 74 out of 100, three breaking contract changes and the two riskiest files listed first


Image: Winnin / Farol (GitHub)

When agents write the code and other agents review it, someone still has to press "merge". Farol, a free tool open-sourced by the software company Winnin, is built for that person. Run it on a pull request and it gives you a verdict (fast track, quick review or careful review) and a risk score out of 100. It also lists the riskiest files first and shows every page, API call and background job the change can reach. A 40-file change where 38 files stand alone gets waved through, while a three-line change to something used by 23 endpoints gets flagged. It reads your code with the real compilers rather than an AI, so the same pull request always gets the same answer, and it never runs your code or sends it anywhere. It works with TypeScript and React, Go and Python projects.

Why it matters: AI tools now write code faster than people can read it. This tells you which changes actually deserve your full attention.

TRY IT → free and open source (MIT licence), with no account needed. You need Node.js 22 or later and git: run npx @winninjs/farol in your project, or add the Farol GitHub Action to comment on every pull request. GitHub: winnin/farol · Live demo · Show HN post

3. Just for fun: TitleArt brings 1990s WordArt back to your browser

Classic WordArt-style text reading "WordArt is back!" in orange, purple and blue 3-D lettering, with "Every classic style, shape, and 3-D effect" and a rainbow "#nostalgia" underneath


Image: TitleArt (titleart.dvy.io)

If you made a school project or a birthday sign in the late '90s, you'll know this look instantly. TitleArt is a free web app that recreates the original Microsoft WordArt, down to the grey, Windows-style menus and toolbars. Its maker, developer Davey Barker, went through old screenshots and tuned each built-in style by eye. You type your text, pick a style from the gallery, then play with colours, shapes, shadows and 3-D effects, and there's even a Motion tab to make it move. You can add pictures, shapes and clip art, then export your masterpiece as a PNG, SVG, GIF or video. It was one of the most popular Show HN posts of the weekend.

Why it matters: not everything needs to be AI. Sometimes the best tool is the one that makes you laugh, and it's handy for a quick, gloriously daggy party invite or slide title.

TRY IT → free in your web browser, with no download and no sign-up. TitleArt · Show HN post

4. Games: Sabre Wulf Remastered, a 1984 jungle classic redrawn for the Commodore 64

The Sabre Wulf Remastered title screen, with carved stone lettering and a glowing sword surrounded by pixel-art jungle


Image: Genesis Project (gp-64.com). Title art by JonEgg.

Sabre Wulf was one of the big hits of 1984, made by Tim and Chris Stamper's studio Ultimate Play The Game, which later became Rare. On Sunday, the long-running Commodore 64 group Genesis Project released the finished version of its remaster, about four years after its first preview. Starting from the original C64 conversion, the team redrew the screens, sprites and title, wrote new music and added a map. You're lost in a 256-screen jungle and need to find four pieces of an amulet to get out. Stab the small critters, run from the big beasts, and keep moving, because if you linger, a bushfire comes for you. It also saves your settings and the top seven scores to the disk.

Why it matters: it's a lovely example of the retro scene still polishing classics more than 40 years later, and a free, one-evening dose of 1980s difficulty.

TRY IT → free to download (a 192 KB disk image). You'll need a real Commodore 64 or a C64 emulator. The free VICE emulator can start the file automatically. It's an unofficial fan project and isn't endorsed by Rare or Microsoft. Sabre Wulf Remastered · How to play · VICE emulator

5. Wildcard: "Steal My Bitcoin", a public dare that lasted 19 hours

The Steal My Bitcoin website reading "My bitcoin was stolen after: 19.28 hours", won on 25 October 2026 at 15:47 UTC with a prize pot of 0.02511679 BTC ($2,021.22)


Image: screenshot of stealmybitcoin.com

Last week PHP, the language behind WordPress and a huge share of websites, rushed out fixes for two critical bugs that can let a stranger take over a web server. On Sunday morning (our time), a developer put a small bitcoin wallet on a server, posted it to Hacker News and dared anyone to steal it. The challenge was to see whether anyone could actually use the bug everyone had been panicking about. So many people piled in that the server kept running out of capacity. Someone did break in. The site says the bitcoin was taken after 19.28 hours, with about US$2,021 (about A$2,876) in the pot, and the winner has promised a write-up.

Why it matters: "critical" warnings can feel abstract. This was a live, public test, and it took less than a day.

TRY IT → free, and worth five minutes today. If you run a website on PHP (WordPress included), update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35, or ask your web host to confirm they have. PHP security advisory, 21 October · Steal My Bitcoin · Show HN post

Also shipped

  • Steam's Halloween horror sale starts this morning. Steam Scream V Fest runs from 4:00am AEDT today (Tuesday 27 October) until early on Tuesday 3 November, Sydney time. This year it's horror games only, plus games that are actually about Halloween, with discounts, demos and upcoming games. Prices vary by game. Steam: Scream V Fest (Steamworks)

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