Three budget coding plans, one light user: what $3 and $20 a month actually buy at Chutes, Z.ai, and Synthetic, and why the quota math is less obvious than the price tags.
Read the post →A $56 used RX 580 runs vision, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech models fast enough for a Home Assistant voice assistant, with VRAM left over for a third model.
Read the post →Stacking $3 coding plans, free API tiers, and OpenCode's multi-model tricks to get far more coding help than I pay for -- while every vendor tries to lock the doors.
Read the post →ByteShape's aggressive 30B quant finally squeezes a usable coding model onto a $600 16 GB GPU -- fast, surprisingly capable, and still no match for a $6 cloud plan.
Read the post →It has been five weeks since I wiped my NVMe drive and installed Bazzite on my desktop workstation. Why five weeks? I figured a blog post about this would be a good way to wrap up 2025! When I wrote...
Read the post →I am not sure this is going to be as direct of a comparison as the title implies. I am not a scientist. I don’t plan to concoct an experiment to test both tools and models against the same task....
Read the post →I’m probably stretching the word “workstation” a little further than I should. I’m talking about the machine I’m typing on right now. It’s my gaming PC, video editing machine, and the place where I sit when I work on blog...
Read the post →I’m not going to make you wait until the end to learn the answer. I’m going to tell you what I think right in the first paragraph. I believe you should subscribe to the Z.ai Coding Lite plan even if...
Read the post →What does it take to upgrade a 3D-printed mouse mod from version 1.0 to 2.0? With software, you usually increment the major number when you’re making a change that makes the program incompatible with the old version in some major...
Read the post →My feelings about local large-language models (LLMs) waffle back and forth every few months. New smaller models come out that perform reasonably well, in both speed and output quality, on inexpensive hardware. Then new massive LLMs arrive two months later...
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