8 posts with this tag
June: $57.01. July: $33.09. Two months after switching to DeepSeek V4 Pro via OpenCode, my AI costs dropped 75%. The commit history proves I shipped more, not less — 786 commits across 4 products. Here's the full breakdown.
I almost built a clever, AI-specific offline mode for DIALØGUE's iOS app. Then I asked a more boring question — what does iOS already give me? — and the real work turned out to be resisting the urge to be clever. Here's the standard, unglamorous machinery behind "download an episode and listen on a plane," and why boring was the senior choice.
I shipped DIALØGUE's iOS app as a port of the web product, then rebuilt it natively — three tabs, lock-screen audio, a synced transcript, resilient offline, and Siri — because a web app shrunk to a phone is still a web app.
I pushed what should have been an upgrade to my podcast platform's voice system. Six days and several commits later, I deleted 2,724 lines of code and rolled back to what worked. Here is what happened and what it taught me about testing production AI changes.
Nineteen days after cancelling Claude Max, my pattern has settled. Codex with GPT-5.4 on xHigh took the coding seat. Claude Code with Opus 4.7 on xHigh took every other seat at the desk.
People still message me asking if the 7 Andrew Ng courses I recommended in 2023 are the right path today. Short answer: most of them, yes, but with a different roadmap around them. Here is my 2026 update, with per-course verdicts and a forked path for builders and operators.
I cancelled Claude Max after 13 months and US$1,892.38 in subscription fees. This is not a victory lap. It is a 30-day test to see whether I can keep shipping STRATUM, DIALOGUE, my course platform, and this site at the same pace with Codex as my primary tool.
Two weeks after my original comparison, both tools shipped major updates. Codex challenged my product strategy in ways Claude Code did not. Claude Code shipped Agent Teams and AutoMemory. The result: I am cutting my $200/month Max plan — and getting better output for less money.