Cost & PricingVendor Lock-In Costs: Measure It Instead of Fearing It
The HTTP call is trivially portable. Prompt tuning, tool-call formats, evaluation baselines and caching semantics are not. How to measure and contain the expensive parts.
ReadNotes on models, agents, and what inference costs
Practical writing for developers building with large language models — how they work, how to pick one, and how to keep the bill predictable.
Cost & Pricing
ModelsVendor-Claimed vs Independent Benchmarks: Reading Both
A launch-post score and a third-party score measure different things. Where the gap comes from, and how to normalise figures before you compare them.
Read
GuidesVercel AI SDK: Wiring Up a Custom OpenAI-Compatible Provider
Point the AI SDK at your own base URL, stream to a React client, keep tool calls working, and avoid the edge runtime traps that break streaming in production.
Read
AI AgentsVerifier Agents: Gating Completion on a Check That Passes
The most reliable agent improvement is refusing to accept completion until something verifies it. How to build a verifier that is worth trusting.
Read
ModelsVision-Language Models: What to Test Before You Commit
Native image input is now common in open-weight models, but published multimodal benchmarks predict almost nothing. Three probes that separate them.
Read
FundamentalsVocabulary Size Trade-offs in Language Model Tokenizers
A bigger vocabulary shortens sequences and costs parameters and rare-token quality. What the dial actually controls and how it reaches your bill.
Read
GuidesVS Code LLM Extension Setup: Custom Endpoints That Work
A provider-agnostic guide to wiring any VS Code AI extension to your own endpoint — where settings live, what the extension cannot infer, and how to debug it.
ReadCost & PricingWhat a Model Upgrade Costs Beyond the Per-Token Rate
A newer model at a lower rate can still raise your monthly bill. Regression testing, prompt drift, output length and tool-call changes are where the cost actually lands.
Read
ModelsWhen to Switch Models: A Threshold Worth Crossing
New models ship constantly and switching is never free. The signals that justify a migration, the ones that do not, and how to run the decision.
Read
FundamentalsWhere Quantised Models Actually Lose Quality
Quantisation degrades capabilities unevenly rather than uniformly. Which ones erode first, why a benchmark delta hides it, and how to measure the loss on your own work.
Read
ModelsWhich Open Model Fits Your GPU: A Memory-First Guide
Total parameters set the memory floor, active parameters set the speed. How to work out what your hardware can actually serve before reading a benchmark.
Read
ModelsWhy Benchmarks Disagree, and Which One to Believe
Two credible evaluations can rank the same models differently without either being wrong. How to read that disagreement instead of picking the flattering one.
ReadShowing 289–300 of 404 articles