Happy New Year and welcome 2026. This is my first article of the year and I have embarked on a very interesting journey. And I am excited to share it with you. Keep reading.

Claude code is an AI coding tool operating within a terminal. It allows users to write, debug and manage code and/or AI tasks more efficiently, without going through an IDE. This typically enhances the AI interaction experience and is also quite light-weight. It also has a in-built “Agentic Loop” where the 3 phases (contextualization, action and verification) happens in a loop to provide for the most optimum output without detailed repetitive prompting. It also supports MCP, subagents, hooks, plugins and what have you.

OpenWrt is a great router firmware with lots of features, flexibility and security updates. It is basically a small Linux distribution and does a smart job at adding enhancements to any “supported” router. One can read more about it here.

I have been using Google Wifi for a while now and it has been a great experience. It has an amazing HW (4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM). Google SW can be controlled using Google Home but privacy, DNS, parental controls, firewall, ad-blocking and other features are either not supported or are not as good as I would like them to be. And also my version of the Wifi AC-1304 does not receive any new features.

I recently got a Netgear R6220 router, an AC1200 dual-band router with very impressive specs. It was awarded the best router in 2016 and now in 2019, I still think it is a very good router. It has a 2 core Mediatek MT7621 (MIPS) processor with 128 MB RAM & 128 MB ROM i.e. ample space with some good processing power. Below you can see the impressive specs. BTW: I got this for almost 15 USD which was a steal!