I use GLM 5.2 via Neuralwatt and it's gotten so cheap I wouldn't mind cancelling my personal Claude subscription if work gave me one. I've spent 374M tokens this month and it only cost me $18 on energy-based pricing.
I went down this rabbit hole last year after buying a carbonator. Rather than mixing a bunch of oils together, I bought my flavors from Bakto Flavors (based in NJ, USA) which is founded by Dr. Daphna Havkin Frenkel who did her research in food sciences and biotechnology, focusing on vanilla. The cola flavor is really good, and I add acetic acid (Vitamin C) + electrolytes to it. If I'm feeling it, I'll add in vanilla, cherry, or lime flavors to it.
I once had a conversation with a potential co-founder who literally told me he was pasting my responses into AI to try to catch up.
Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.
Small business owners work 997 and you don't see them incessantly posting about it. That's the catch, though. They own the business. Founders can subject themselves to 996 all they want but it's a failure of management to expect that from employees for less than 1% equity.
I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
I interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right.
After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.
Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.
The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
We’re building an AI-powered home manager: a proactive, chat-first system that helps homeowners stay ahead of bills, maintenance, documents, and expenses.
We're backed by founders of Freshly ($1.5B), Kustomer ($1B), and more.
What we're building:
- Structured parsing of home docs (insurance, warranties, bills)
- Personalized maintenance schedules
- Expense tracking with home-specific insights
- Natural language interface
- Embedded payments + smart renewal workflows
You’ll:
- Lead development of user-facing features with React, TypeScript, CSS
- Build elegant UIs for AI-driven workflows
- Design new UI paradigms for LLM-powered assistants
- Own frontend architecture and contribute to product strategy
- Optimize for responsiveness, performance, accessibility
Requirements:
- 3+ years experience in frontend development
- Strong with React, TypeScript, modern CSS
- UX focus with portfolio of polished, intuitive interfaces
- Experience with design systems and collaborating closely with product/design
Bonus:
- Experience with LLMs or AI interfaces
- Background in productivity tools or intelligent assistants