I'm a full stack, jack-of-all-trades software engineer and leader. I use a combination of boring and cutting-edge tech to build useful products quickly.
My current venture is Semi-Decent, a software consultancy that helps businesses build and scale software products. We are intensely pragmatic and focus on combining lean MVPs with user research to guide our clients towards growth. We take the risk out of software projects by keeping scope short and focused and offering a money-back guarantee. https://www.semi-decent.com/
I also run a side business making bespoke, sustainable craft cocktails for events: https://www.theminimalmixologist.com/
But they don't appear to subsidize them to the same degree. I've only been using Devin for less than a month, but I've been hitting the limits of the $20/month plan way more quickly than I'd expect, and definitely more quickly than with Claude Code or Codex.
So far, Cursor provides the best value for their subscription, but I have to imagine they're basically lighting money on fire. There's no way their current pricing is sustainable.
But that 10% is the most important part! Getting the plumbing wrong means you might have bugs or your code is brittle. Getting the domain-specific business logic wrong means your product doesn't fundamentally solve the correct problem.
Ironically, Devin Desktop is one of those tools. It supports any harness that supports ACP (which is most of them)—you can use Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc from the Devin Desktop UI.
I'm currently experimenting with OpenSpec[0] as the "framework" and using different subscriptions for different parts of the spec-driven process: Opus via Claude Code for exploration, Devin SWE for building, and GLM 5.2 via the Z.ai Coding Plan for verification. I don't love having to mix and match harnesses, but in practice it's barely more effort than switching models.
But some requirements you don't realize you have until you start building. With a fast model, you can surface those really quickly and have more time to iterate and explore different solutions. With a slower but smarter model, you just hope that what it produces after an hour is what you were imagining.
And yes, with Fable, the chance of that is higher than with SWE/Composer, but in my experience it's not so much higher that the extra time and cost is worth it. But it certainly depends on your goals and what you're building.
The regular one (not the fast variant) is free but slow. The "Lightning" variant (which uses Cerebras and gets supposedly 1000 TPS) costs $12.50/M output, $2.5/M input, $1/M cached input. So it's quite a bit more expensive than SWE 1.6.
That's not why Elm is an ideal language for LLMs: it's because, if it compiles, it's most likely working software. Agentic workflows have gotten significantly better over the last year, so LLMs using languages like Elm, Haskell, or even Rust have an amazing feedback loop where even lower quality models can keep trying until things compile.
> asking an LLM to reverse engineer and make your own plugin is trivial.
If you already have engineers on staff, a few tens (or even hundreds) of dollars per month per plugin is likely a rounding error budget-wise. If you don't have your own engineers, you're probably not going to be able to produce something as good (reliable, well thought out, etc) as a commercial offering.
I had the same gut reaction as you, but the reality is much more subtle. We work with several clients who are bought into at least one of these ecosystems, and there's no way the math ever works out in favor of building an in-house solution.
At least 3 times a month. I have a rental property and my tenant prefers to mail a check instead of paying extra to pay electronically. My spouse gets paid by check for dumb reasons I won't get into. I sometimes get dividends from my insurance company via check. And then several family members still prefer to use checks to pay each other back instead of Venmo or other electronic services.
I blame it on the fact that the US doesn't have a free electronic bank transfer system like the rest of the developed world.
Many banks gate features like mobile check deposit behind the native app. The nearest ATM is 20 minutes away from my house, so unfortunately I consider this feature essential.
Also, there are multiple "correct" ways to code something, so imperfect code that solves the problem is still useful. A medical diagnosis is either correct or incorrect.
Probably because HDR on the vast majority of non-OLED monitors is useless. You really need a monitor with great contrast and a good HDR implementation for it to be of any benefit.
I'm not an expert, but I think those are the same thing. But for an LLM etched onto a whole wafer, it doesn't make sense to disable part of it since that would remove some weights entirely.
I don't know about you, but I generally don't write code in a vacuum. Other people may have touched it before me. Those other people may have made poor decisions.
Not that I'm immune from choosing the wrong abstraction sometimes. More than once the "other people" was me. We all make mistakes.
> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.
Sorry, what? Unless you're doing a deep clean of your house twice a week or you live in a particularly HCOL area, those numbers don't add up. You shouldn't be spending more than $1k/month on household chores, and even that seems high.
Source: A client of ours runs a "personal help" service (mostly focused on household tasks like laundry, tidying, organizing, etc as opposed to deep cleaning) so I have a lot of data on this. And they're a relatively premium service compared to some of the cheap labor you can actually buy. But they also don't operate in SF or NYC, so maybe prices are drastically different there.
The Chinese open weight models have been ahead of Sonnet (at least for coding) for a couple months now. I tend to take benchmarks with a huge grain of salt, but in my own experience, the latest versions of Kimi, MiMo, and GLM (pre-5.2) had already surpassed Sonnet in terms of output quality for a fraction of the price.
With that said, I'm excited to try GLM 5.2 because I still end up reaching for Opus and GPT 5.5 for many tasks because the open models tend to get stuck more often on complex problems.
My current venture is Semi-Decent, a software consultancy that helps businesses build and scale software products. We are intensely pragmatic and focus on combining lean MVPs with user research to guide our clients towards growth. We take the risk out of software projects by keeping scope short and focused and offering a money-back guarantee. https://www.semi-decent.com/
I also run a side business making bespoke, sustainable craft cocktails for events: https://www.theminimalmixologist.com/
Please get in touch! I'd love to chat.
[email protected]