Writing
Long-form notes from real work
Cloud infrastructure, DevSecOps, agentic engineering. Less polished than a blog, more organized than a wiki.
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The translation cost $1.26. Reading it cost a day.
A measured pilot drafted 2,648 Spanish strings in eleven minutes for $1.26. The expensive part is the working day of native-speaker review per language.
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Grok Bot feels like Claude Code did last year
Claude Code was the first harness that made agentic work feel shippable. Grok Bot is the first cloud-native personal-assistant stack that gave me that same jolt: named agents with real computers, and roughly zero ops.
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Same harness, more engines: when one model stops being the default brain
I was an Opus fan. Then Opus 5 spent a session proving a solvable problem impossible, and Fable answered every question with a wall of tokens. So I stopped routing every hard job to Anthropic and started matching the model to the task. Grok shipped what Opus explained away; GLM does the cheap bulk. The skill I actually needed was routing.
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$0/month realtime infrastructure on Cloudflare Durable Objects
A browser multiplayer shooter where one small server keeps the score and calls every hit, running at $0/month on Cloudflare's free tier. The trick is a Durable Object: one named, long-lived instance per room that Cloudflare places at the edge and bills nothing while it sleeps. Fourth in a $0 series after OpenClaw, Holtwick, and the wrist meter.
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1 token on your wrist: a $40 Claude meter
A $40 ESP32 smartwatch reads my Claude quota in real time. The trick is that the watch never talks to Claude. An OCI VM pings the API every five minutes with max_tokens 1, reads the quota out of the response headers, and pushes the result through Tailscale, an Android foreground service, and BLE to a wrist.
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A town of $0 AI characters, built while I slept
DevOps in 2026 is also FinOps for AI. Following OpenClaw, my $0/month personal assistant, Holtwick is a town of NPCs at $0/month: twelve persona-driven AI characters whose voices stream in under a second from Cloudflare and Groq's free tiers, in a 3D world that overnight Ralph loops built while I slept.
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OpenClaw on Oracle Cloud Free Tier: Lobster in the shell
An AI assistant on $0/month infrastructure: open-source middleware on a free cloud VM that, once you live with it, looks suspiciously like the core of the AI hype itself.