Cost & PricingAI on a Student or Solo Developer Budget
You do not need a frontier model for most of what you do. A practical guide to getting real work done on AI when the budget is small and the meter is scary.
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
AI AgentsAI vs AI Agent: What Actually Changes When You Add a Loop
A model answers. An agent decides, acts, and checks its work. The difference is a loop and a set of tools — here is exactly what that means in code.
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GuidesAider Setup Guide: Any OpenAI-Compatible Endpoint
Configure Aider against a custom base URL — the openai/ prefix, .aider.conf.yml, model metadata for unknown models, and picking the right edit format.
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GuidesAutomating Code Review With LLMs Without Drowning in Noise
Automated review fails on precision, not capability. How to budget comments, give the model the context a diff omits, and measure whether anyone is acting on the output.
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Cost & PricingBatching Requests to Save Money: When It Pays
Batch endpoints trade latency for a large discount, and packing items into one prompt amortises overhead. Here is when each pays and when neither does.
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ModelsBest Model for Code Review: Optimise for Precision, Not Recall
An automated reviewer that flags everything gets muted within a week. How to pick and evaluate a model on false-positive rate, and why review has odd economics.
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ModelsBest Model for Debugging: Judge It on How It Handles Being Wrong
Debugging is a search problem, so the model that wins is the one that forms testable hypotheses and abandons them fast. How to evaluate that properly.
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ModelsBest Model for Test Generation: Coverage Is Not the Metric
Models are very good at producing tests that pass and prove nothing. Use mutation score to pick one, and treat test writing as your cheapest high-volume task.
ReadGuidesBuilding a Chatbot From Scratch: The Parts Nobody Mentions
The model call is twenty lines. The other ninety percent is conversation state, idempotency, abuse limits and knowing when a reply was wrong. A build order that works.
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AI AgentsBuilding Your First Agent: A Loop, Three Tools, One Guard
Skip the framework. An agent is a while loop over a tool-calling model. Here is the minimum that works, and the four things that break it first.
ReadGuidesChoosing an AI Provider: The Questions to Ask
A checklist of the questions that separate providers you can plan around from ones you cannot, covering model transparency, limits, compatibility and exit terms.
ReadGuidesCline Setup Guide: Pointing It at a Custom Endpoint
Configure Cline against any OpenAI-compatible base URL — the provider fields, the model configuration block that people skip, and separate Plan and Act models.
ReadShowing 637–648 of 731 articles