Guides & answers

Written 9 Sep 2026 · Prices verified 20 Oct 2026

What things mean, how to start in minutes, and the errors everybody hits — the short answer first.

• Gemini Context Caching: 95% Off Your Input Bill — and Three Ways It Bites BackArgon cache reads cost $0.10/1M vs $2.00 uncached, verified. But explicit caches bill their full TTL even when deleted early, and implicit discounts can silently vanish.
• The Hidden Price of Cheap AI APIs: What 99.55% Uptime Actually Costs YouDeepSeek's Flash API shows 99.55% uptime — about 39 hours a year of failed requests. The full arithmetic on when that's free and when it's expensive, why agent pipelines compound it, and a three-way routing rule for cheap tokens.
• The Flat-Rate Era of AI Coding Subscriptions Is OverCursor's June 2025 credit pools, Copilot's June 1 2026 AI Credits (1,500–20,000 credits per month at ~$0.01 each), and Gemini's October 9 tier cut all point one way: heavy users now pay metered. The verified numbers, the counter-argument taken seriously, and what to measure before you renew.
• The Uncanny Valley Moved Into the Interview RoomAI screens candidates for 700+ companies; 71% of candidates use AI on their resumes; nearly 4 in 10 have walked out of an AI interview. What candidates actually report, why 'uncanny valley' is the right frame, and what the fix looks like.
• Claude API Pricing: The 3 Places Heavy Users OverpayClaude's list price is not the bill. Heavy users overpay in three fixable places: flagship-by-default routing (up to 5x on output), cache churn (~80% of repeated input spend), and skipping the 50% batch discount — plus the router trap that silently kills your cache hit rate. With a stated compromise for cache-hostile workloads.
• Two Letters, One Executive Order: How .si Became the Internet's Fastest Gold RushWhen the U.S. rebranded AI as 'Super Intelligence (SI)', Slovenia's sleepy country domain out-registered .ai in 25 hours and surged 2,100% in a month. Inside the fastest namespace repricing the internet has seen — and what it teaches about meaning, scarcity, and squatters.
• $4,000 on Your Desk vs $1.20 a Million Tokens: Should an Agent Developer Buy a DGX Spark?The DGX Spark costs $3,999. We ran the break-even math against DeepSeek's API — and against the $15/month subscription plans that quietly kill the savings story. Privacy and control buy the box; savings don't.
• Gemini 3.8 Flash API Pricing ExplainedGemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.75/$3.75 per 1M tokens until December 31, 2026 — then $1.50/$7.50. The doubling is really the 3.x intro rate expiring back to the old 3.5 Flash list price, and thinking tokens billed as output mean the real bill exceeds the sticker price. Batch mode, effort levels, caching, and what to do before the deadline.
• GLM Coding Plan Off-Peak, Explainedz.ai charges half credits outside weekday peak hours (14:00–18:00 UTC+8) — just 20 peak hours a week. From Sept 25 to Oct 7, 2026, every hour counts as off-peak. Here's how the credit math works, plus an independent check of the 92% savings claim.
• GLM Coding Plan: Worth It? Full BreakdownGLM Coding Plan reviewed from official sources: Lite $18/mo ($12.60 yearly), 10,000 weekly credits, the 115-credit agent session math, API break-even at ~5.7 sessions/day, and the zero-quota 23:00-09:00 campaign, plus an honest read of the Reddit quality debate: where the plan holds up and where it won't.
• AI Coding Assistant Real CostSeat prices are the entry fee, not the bill: official Copilot, Cursor, Claude and ChatGPT tiers checked Sep 24 2026, the credit and usage layers on top, third-party estimates of $100-250 per developer monthly, and a DeepSeek API worked example with official rates.
• DeepSeek Harness QuickstartDeepSeek's official open-source agent harness: the three entry points (dsh, Web UI, Python SDK), the write-only key design, the image-input declaration quirk, what the minimal composition actually runs, and how it differs from the Claude Code / Codex / Copilot integrations.
• Free LLM APIs That Actually Stay FreeWe checked every free LLM API tier against official docs on Sep 16, 2026: OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers AI, Mistral, Groq, Gemini — plus GitHub Models, which is now dead.
• DeepSeek API Error Codes Explained — Plus Two Failures DeepSeek Doesn't ListSeven documented error codes, the 429 advice you might not expect, and two failures DeepSeek doesn't list: silent model reroutes and the July 24 model-name cutoff. Checked Sept 14, 2026.
• What Is MCP? Model Context Protocol Explained (2026)MCP is an open protocol that lets AI apps call external tools and read external data. What it actually defines, the three things a server offers, and what changed in the July 2026 rewrite.