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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

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Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#251

Post by sail0rm00n »

atreids wrote: post #163
Yoric wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly at DeepSeek? It was my understanding (but I didn't check) that some other AI operators were providing (some of?) DeepSeek's model for cheaper prices. Still, that's interesting. What do you get for that price? Only coding, or also e.g. image generation?

Footprint's comment is correct. I go directly to Deepseek's platform API which they linked. There's no image generation but you get access to Deepseek V4 Flash and Deepseek V4 Pro, both of which are very capable for general text based tasks and programming. Flash is insanely cheap for how good it is ($0.14 per 1M input tokens vs $15 with Claude 4.7). V4 Pro I would put somewhere in the range of 80 to 90% as good as O…

This is awesome, thank you for posting this. Are you using pi, Hermes, or another harness? I’d love to hear more about your workflow.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#252

Post by smeej »

Random09 wrote: post #148
gabriel-uribe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV but automations eat through the $100-$200 plans, which burn thousands in tokens alone. I have hourly automations for root cause analysis on customer support issues, daily automations for eg log analysis, weekly & monthly automations for KPI tracking & actioning. I will say, when I was building side projects that were 1) fairly well defined in scope and 2) without users/need for automations it was much easier to…

Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

Honestly, having spent a huge chunk of my career in customer support, 80%+ of the tickets could be solved with a script and not need an AI. Just about every company has a catalog of macros for answering support tickets and once you have a good set, 80% of people just need you to send them a link to the support article where you actually already answered their question in great detail, if they'd bothered to look for it.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#253

Post by rk06 »

aerhardt wrote: post #132
tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

Well, if you believe the people who sell the tokens, you should be creating loops that keep yanking the bandit’s arm.

yes, that is probably why the "one armed bandit" was called that. and the name is sufficient reason to keep any reasonable person away

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#254

Post by Frannky »

I read some cool posts of people trying MiniMax 3 on 4x GB10. I wonder if we are almost there that with 10k we can have Opus 4.6 level at home. I feel tweaking the harnesses and a few more versions from oss models and some new hardware from AMD and Intel could get us there pretty soon. Or maybe we are already there? Someone was able to do it already?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#255

Post by [deleted] »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #235
dpcan wrote: post #136

I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money. I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week. What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much? Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher mo…

If you can give your agent broad access and an effective feedback loop, you just need to steer it and do a final check on outputs. As an example I might have an agent with access to a browser, logs, metrics, GitHub& CI logs etc. and ask it to implement a new feature. In Slack I have a few bug reports so I spin up a few more agents. A PM needs a UI tweak so I spin up an agent. You can imagine that a lot of work a dev…

[deleted]

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#256

Post by ozim »

mwcampbell wrote: post #33

I invested about $4,000 in an NVIDIA DGX Spark several months ago. 128 GB of unified RAM, and the NVIDIA GB10 chip. With the RAM, the several CPU cores, and the 4 TB NVMe SSD, it's a very capable ARM64 Linux computer even without the GPU, and so far I've mostly been using it as such. But I wonder, what's the most capable model, specifically for coding, that can run well on that hardware?

If you don't know that already and "using it as such" ... your post should start with "I blew off $4k on a toy several months ago".

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#257

Post by [deleted] »

rbalicki wrote: post #149
vitally3643 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

I'll add another use case for letting an AI go ham: many small, atomic refactors where the name of the game is never breaking anything. My personal OSS projects don't have the scale to necessarily make this worth it, but at work I run three pipelines using Barnum ( https://barnum-circus.github.io/ ). First, one that ingests files, identifies refactors (from a pre-approved list), and places a precise description of th…

[deleted]

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#258

Post by barnabee »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

Yeah I agree. I’m “vibe engineering” an entire (non-trivial) programming language, toolchain, and standard library, as well as some smaller side projects. I leave OpenCode implementing entire milestones unattended for long periods regularly.

I feel like I’d need to not have a job or a life if I wanted to exhaust the OpenAI $100 plan using GPT 5.5 xhigh, and I’ve found it insanely capable.

That said, while I don’t read the code much (if at all), I do discuss each milestone up front to make a plan, and use/dogfood the results to direct any follow-ups and refinements, which puts a natural cap on the ratio of LLM contributions to my input for these side projects. I believe these human parts are still necessary not to eventually end up with a mess.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#259

Post by ffsm8 »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

Set your agent effort to maximum and watch your tokens vanish

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#260

Post by dmzxnico »

I use Claude 100$ + Codex 20$. That's a lot already and I rarely hit my quota before it resets, usually right on time.

Some times I also get OpenCode Go just to get access to chinese models as an extra for new projects I don't really care about, fun ones.

That's way cheaper than hiring a dev anyways.

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