Blog
Notes & writing
Thoughts on software engineering, the things I'm building, and what I learn along the way.
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AI
GPT-6.1 Sol Is a Really Good Model That I'll Never Use
GPT-6.1 Sol gets close to Astra and trades blows with Claude Opus 5.5 for a fifth of Astra's price. On paper it's one of the best deals in AI. But OpenAI halved Pro $200 the same day it launched, and Codex has been "at capacity" for a month. Cheap per token isn't the same as cheap to use.
15 min read
AI
ChatGPT Pro $200 Is Back, With Half the Usage
OpenAI reopened its $200 ChatGPT Pro plan today, but it now buys half as much Codex and ChatGPT Work usage. It went from the best-value AI subscription to one with no bulk discount at all, while Claude Max 20x still gives you 20x for the same $200.
10 min read
AI
Claude Sonnet 5.5 Review: Same Price, Far Less Waste
Claude Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's $2/$10 pricing, costs far less than Opus 5.5, and is still pretty good. My take on the pricing, the cache-pricing gap, how it compares with GPT-6 Sol, and why it isn't my first pick for hard coding.
12 min read
Security
My .env file sat on GitHub for three years, and nothing warned me
In 2023 I committed a .env file full of production credentials to a public repository, then "fixed" it with a .gitignore line that did nothing. No alert ever reached me. I found it by accident this week.
5 min read
AI Agents
Fable 5 is Back, Sonnet 5 is Here, and AI Agents Still Need Real Guardrails
Sonnet 5 is here and Fable 5 is back. Agentic AI is powerful, but it can become expensive, unpredictable, overly cautious, and operationally hard to trust when it is not managed properly.
3 min read